You Are Not Maradona, Only Maradona Is Maradona

 

I used to go play football at the sports complex near my house. We’re going all the way back to the mid-2000s here. I wasn’t very good. I mean, I was awful. I wouldn’t be my own first pick if I were made captain. But I loved playing and I would run a lot — I felt like I’d be letting down my coach, Alex Ferguson, if I didn’t finish each game in a crumpled heap. Given that I’m left-footed, if someone noticed it they would address me as “Lefty”. Otherwise my name was “defender” since I played on the left side of defence mostly. For some, my name was “Oye”.

That’s how it works. Most such playgrounds in Delhi are pretty democratic spaces and anyone can join in. The lure of football is impossible for even the most hardened cynic, especially if there’s the prospect of rain in the air. So it was quite normal to see 30 people of all ages and sizes running around headlessly on the hockey field we called the “pitch”. Literally everyone screaming curses at each other, with that one slightly older wet-blanket uncle who would “please request” the others to “mind your language”, so you’d have to grudgingly tone down the F-bombs and the M-bombs and the B-bombs and the C-Bombs.

This also means that no one knows anyone’s name, so people tend to get creative. The goalkeeper is known as “Keeper” if you went to a fancy school, “Goalie” if you didn’t. If you’re truly connected to your roots though, you’ll address him as “Golchi”. Any new kid is thrown in defence, and he’s known forever as “Kid” or “Bachcha”. If you’re tall, bless your soul, you will be known as “Lamboo” until you saw off a few inches in frustration. You will be expected to head every ball, and blamed appropriately. All fat kids, predictably, were known as “Mota”. The guys who ran really fast were “Ghoda”, aka a horse. A friend of mine wore an Italy jersey from the 2004 Euros with Totti’s name on the back once, and for the next many years his name was “Toaty”.

To be clear, this wasn’t some tactically sophisticated match up of contrasting styles and footballing philosophies. It was classic amateur football: kick and run, over and over again. There’s a vague sense of someone keeping score, but it’s ultimately “last goal wins”. So the more agricultural skills were valued more — all strikers were either strong or fast, and they could shoot well. The central defender literally just needed to know how to kick long. The job of the weak players in the team was merely to latch on to a stray ball, and pass it to the striker, known (obviously) as “Striker”, who’d yell if he didn’t get the ball quickly enough. Sure, our level of football may have been primitive, but all strikers everywhere are the same. They live for the glory of goals, and that’s all they care about. The lead singers of football teams, and just as annoying.

Regional ethnicities played as much of a role in the naming ritual of players as identifiable physical attributes did. And with that, of course, comes the possibility of bigotry. All bulky defenders were given a colloquial term that I won’t repeat because I found out much later in life that it’s racist. Sikh kids, regardless of age, were “Paaji” — this wasn’t mean-spirited, and they usually didn’t mind. There was some casual racism toward people from other states. And anyone over the age of 25 was dubbed “Uncle”, a trend I was fully supportive of for the first 24 years of my life, after which I had a rethink.

And then there was “Maradona”. This wasn’t a compliment as you’d reasonably expect. Sure, he may have been arguably the greatest footballer to have ever lived. But on the playground, he had morphed into a whole other concept. He was reduced — or, rather, elevated — to a taunt and an insult. Every few weeks, a new kid would show up. He’d have greater designs on glory. Maybe he used to play in his school or college team, maybe he had some rudimentary understanding of the game thanks to the internet or an overeager older cousin. He’d try stepovers and flicks, backheels and all that stuff. He’d take on his man and dribble past him. The maverick with a bad attitude.

It didn’t matter whether he was any good or not. No one cared if his tricks came off. What he was doing was breaking a code. It was unethical. He was making everyone look like a fool! How dare he? Like, no one resented the striker for scoring constant tap-ins, but this guy got heat just for being stylish. Really, this kid’s problem was that he had ideas above his station. He didn’t know his place. “That shit doesn’t belong here, you son of Maradona.” Or: “Try that again you Maradona, and then I’ll show you. Zyaada hero ban raha hai? Abhi dikhata hoon, saale Maradona.”

It was bizarre. You could slide into people, smack them in the head, elbow them in the throat, thwack at their shins. It was all fine. These were war wounds. But one tiny little stepover and people would lose their shit. Embarrassment was more painful than actual physical pain. You’d disparagingly be called “Maradona” and people would be out to get you. And the thing is, the “Maradona”, like the real thing, would take the piss. He’d enjoy it. He’d keep doing it over and over again, further enraging everyone.

If memory serves, Kaka was arguably the best player in the world at the time. Ronaldinho had had his time in the sun, and Messi was coming up fast. Ronaldo, the Brazilian one, had already done his thing a few years ago. Pele’s presence was forever lurking. But the trickster on the playground was always “Maradona”, never another player.

The underlying idea here was that that kind of stuff was reserved for Maradona and no one else. He is a higher being. That you, little upstart twat, are a pretender and a fraud suffering from arrogance and delusions of grandeur. You can’t pull this crap here, only Maradona can. You are not Maradona, only Maradona is Maradona.

Ecstatic Peace

 

Danzon No. 2 and I will not stay friends for very long — in fact, the bonds are weakening even as we speak. It’s got a specific ephemeral quality to it, where you suck all possible joy out of it in a compressed period of time. Then you part ways for a few months or so, until your orbits intersect once more.

In the two weeks that I’ve been mortally obsessed with it, it’s had a strange effect on me. There’s the full body tingling at each transition. Or, like, my head becoming really scrunched and compact during a build up, following by — whoosh! — complete emptiness upstairs. Light-headed, ecstatic peace. Or my face feeling flush. Turning a sparkling shade of turquoise. Sensing imminent heaviness in the eyes. Getting so immersed in the piece that I forget to exhale. Heart rate yo-yoing. Feeling uncontrollable euphoria.  

Basically, if it weren’t already clear, Danzon No. 2 is physical music, the kind of piece you hear with your whole body. An eruption of pure overwhelming joy. Not to sound like a two-bit spiritual conman, but it provokes a fragile synergy between the sounds and the body (like all trumpet music tends to*). It gives as much as it asks of you. It’s humbling.

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(* Also, all cello music too. All string quartets do that. Some piano music does that. Every single melody on the harp or the glockenspiel does it. For some people, not me though, the classical guitar has that effect. The oud, for sure. [A quick aside to the aside: I tried to buy an oud once, knowing full well that I cannot, for the life of me, play a fretless instrument. Mercifully, I was priced out of it — a second-hand one would have set me back Rs. 70k, and that's without the international delivery charge, import duty, and all the other hidden expenses that go with it.] Then there’s this sitar-like African instrument whose name I forget. Many Chinese string instruments. Come to think of it, it’s a long list.)

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And the piece is so deceptive. The opening melody on the woodwinds has a playful, mischief-making tendency to it — that fleeting, fraction-of-a-second break in the tune transforms it entirely. The violins and percussions build on that emotion. And then you sort of know what’s going to happen next. At least I thought I did.

I listen to a decent — not excessive — amount of classical music. A lot of it develops an easy, tempting melody at first to comfort the listener and place her in the moment, before shifting moods to something more challenging. (For reference, listen to the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and contrast its simplistic grace to the far more defiant intensity of its second movement.) The drama of classical music lies in its ability to surprise you (and move you) with these grand tonal departures between parts and movements. There’s a unifying concept holding the whole thing together, but within that lies a world of decorative swings. Maximalism, at times for its own sake, but just as often profound and affective.

Danzon No. 2 takes a slightly different approach. It’s a famous contemporary orchestral piece from '94, built on modern traditions, by Mexican composer Arturo Marquez. My memory of art history is, let’s say, strained, but from what I remember, contemporary classical music basically retains the spirit of old-timey classical music while at the same time generously shitting on every established convention in the form. A movement that, at its roots, was anti-prescriptive (though it may have fallen into those same traps later, sparking more abstract postmodern movements). (Just a disclaimer: all of this could be completely bull — literally zero research has gone into these claims I’ve just confidently made.) 

Anyway, what Danzon does instead is it takes that initial melody, and then, for the next 10 minutes, it goes bigger. And bigger. And bigger. It mangles that early motif, manipulates it, threatens to disintegrate into chaos. It smashes into that melody from all sides. It speeds up and slows down. It descends into complete silence, erupts into inexplicable orchestral crescendos. But it never loses its heart. When you think the piece has probably reached its peak, and it’s time for a change, it pulls out, like, a 14^th rabbit.

What’s remarkable is that, thoughtful as all its melodies are, they’re also very immediate and accessible and enormous. Almost Bollywood-like in their approachability. That kind of stuff — pop music-adjacent — is almost always thrilling but loses its shine quickly. It gets old and repetitive.

Maybe it’s the time in life I heard this piece, or maybe it’s the fact that I’m a total sucker for compositions that retain a singular focus and experiment with themes of minimalism. Either way, for my ears, the piece — at a formidable 10 minutes — never once overstays its welcome. It twinkles all through.

Sadly, our relationship is now on its last legs. The connection is dissolving into long passages of silence followed by little crumbs of fleeting comfort. I no longer get that physical rush from the song. I’m in that agonising limboish stage where I’m left with very vivid past memories that I keep trying (and failing) to recreate. And I’m filled with the fear of impending loss. It’s going to leave me soon — in another day or two it will start to get on my nerves. In three days, it will pass right through me. Plus ca change though — all we’re really trying to do is recreate the rush over and over again, scared to death that one day we won’t be able to. And on it goes.  

All Songs Are Always Happy Memories

I was just sitting around today, minding my own business. For no good reason, a song entered my brain. It was by Fleetwood Mac. That “listen to the wind blow” one, called ‘The Chain’. I haven’t heard this song in forever — upwards of 10 years if we’re counting only active listens — but that’s how these things work. It happens all the time: some stupid song, like an annoying repressed memory, pops up out of nowhere and ruins your day. Before going any further, I must declare that I am absolutely not a fan of Fleetwood Mac, largely because their name sounds like a honky-tonk, cowboy-hat-wearing country music icon’s third album, but for other banal reasons too.

So I hit up my old friend YouTube, and tumbled down a mini YouTube and Google spiral. I remember I was first introduced to this song when I was in my second year of college, listening to an altogether different song called ‘Wind Blow’ by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, which used to play all the time on the radio — Hit 95 — as I’d drive my mum’s rickety old car to college every morning (which I’d bullied her into letting me use after I tried taking the bus, jumped out of a moving one because I’d gotten on to the wrong bus, reached home a bloody mess, and swore off buses forever).

To recycle one of the oldest themes around music, and also one of its most beautiful attributes: when you hear a song after a long time, you’re immediately transported back to the time you first heard that song. You remember everything with a shocking level of clarity: where you were, what you were doing, even the way that piece of music made you feel that very first time. Songs are always happy memories, even when they’re associated with truly horrifying things. (It’s often the same thing with smells.)

Anyway, so the Bone Thugs song sampled ‘The Chain’, taking its catchy guitar melody and its memorably defiant chorus, and made it even grander in its treatment. I hit up YouTube to listen to it, and I did — a few thousand times. And then I played the original Fleetwood Mac version, which I listened to a few thousand times as well.

Then I googled Fleetwood Mac — that’s when something strange began to happen. Like a system restore of sorts. With every link I clicked, with every photo I looked at, a new piece of a puzzle I’d already solved began to emerge. It seemed to me, very suspiciously, like I knew literally everything I was reading about Fleetwood Mac, including the names of its members and what they looked like 45 years ago or whatever.

Was it déjà vu? I doubt it, since, from what I remember, déjà vu is a momentary feeling where one eye sees the thing a little before the other one does, and so when the second eye sees it, the brain has already registered the first viewing as fact — or something weird like that, like a computer virus. This was no momentary emotion — my feelings appeared to me bit by bit over several minutes; a reluctant recovery of long forgotten memories.

So it leaves a couple of options, neither of which is particularly appealing to me right now. One is that I have always had some kind of latent spiritual connection with Fleetwood Mac and I activated those pathways by accident today. That I knew nothing about Fleetwood Mac, but once I read about them, I realised that I’d known them all my life and theirs. This is worrying to me because, for starters, I don’t believe in spirituality. It’s not a real thing. And on the next to impossible possibility that I may be wrong, Fleetwood Mac? Couldn’t my supposed spirit have picked someone better? And worse, where does it end? Do I also share a connection with, like, Father John Misty? Jimmy Page? Anupam Kher?

The other option is that I have somehow managed to completely erase from my brain mid-sized passages of my life spent reading about and listening to Fleetwood Mac. That’s just weird and mildly unsettling.  

A Hopeful And Hopeless Farce

Not even 10 games into the new Premier League season, and everything is already starting to piss me off. The initial optimism — the spirit of hope that kickstarts each new season before it slowly starts to dissolve — has worn off. And one of the things on that list of piss-off triggers for me, though it's somewhere near the bottom, is the FPL. I hate it. (But I also love it.)

I spent many childhood years aimlessly changing formations and strategies on those Football Manager computer games, as well as its cricket equivalent, the name of which I don’t remember. I started playing fantasy football around 15 years ago, when the internet became more of a thing, and it was so much fun. I’m a bit of a self-styled football analyst — a friend and I have even discussed, and agreed, that the two of us should be the new joint Directors of Football at Man Utd — though I’m humble enough to concede that maybe I’m not very good at it.

But at the same time, I’ve always had a slightly uncomfortable relationship with the FPL. I’m morally opposed to the game, for reasons best described as farty and highfalutin. I probably shouldn’t get into them here but this is my blog (not yours) so here goes: the very concept of FPL is antithetical to the real thing. 

It makes you root for a minimum of eight players who you absolutely do not support in real life. Your own success in the game is predicated on the success, often, of teams you hate. And you start watching games in a very different way, focussing on individuals and their impact on the play, rather than the play itself. My views on football loyalty are painfully inflexible — I suspect a therapist might even deem them to be unhealthy. But until I get help, I will continue to believe that there is a kind of purity in supporting your club, a kind of moral virtue perhaps (for lack of less judgy phrases).* That sticking to them no matter how shit they get becomes a part of my — and other supporters’ — own identity. Wanting complete strangers to win a game on TV, feeling good about their victory or, more importantly, suffering with them as they lose, is the joy of sport. At its heart, sport is a nonsense, a hopeful and hopeless farce.

And FPL questions this very foundational basis of watching football. But — crucially — it’s also so much fun! I got sucked into it last season after like 12 years of abstaining, but now I’m back in it. And it makes me very uncomfortable. So I’ve found a little compromise here by creating a self-imposed restriction on my team.

Here’s how it goes: Every single starting 11 of mine will have the maximum allowed quota of three United players, one of whom will always be the captain. I will stuff my squad with as many Leicester City players as I can, given that they’re my designated “second team”. And the only Liverpool player allowed in my team will be Mo Salah (because I like that curly selfish bastard) — in fairness, I let Sadio Mane in a few times last year because I’m weak.  

This would have been a decent enough restriction to place except that Man Utd sucks now. We’re well and truly in the shitter, and I’ve made my peace with that (while still retaining that neverending strain of hope). But relevant here is the fact that my club’s inherent shittiness absolutely destroys my FPL prospects. While people all around me are picking up double points after double points with Kane, Auba, KDB, or whoever, my loser team is plodding along embarrassing itself and me — as I have to suffer through my friends Rashford and James giving me solid 2s and 4s and ruining each weekend of mine. ‘Twas ever thus.

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* A club thousands of kilometres away, supported simply because they were on TV when I was a kid and something about them clicked with my still-developing brain, a club with whom my real-world connection is, um, tenuous. But support them I must.

Best Of 2018

Dear reader, please tread with grace and restraint, for it is likely that you will have 10 entirely different songs to contribute to this list. And you will be absolutely correct in that assessment too. The purpose of lists such as these is not to rate or rank or reach any kind of consensus. The spirit here isn’t competitive, especially in a world where we all have access to some 45 million songs on our phones, as also the opportunity to develop, direct, and curate our listening habits based exactly on what we might like. Instead, it is to guide others to new music, to aid the process of discovery, and to personally discover something new in the process as well. With that out of the way, here are the 10 best songs that were released in 2018, and the writer of this piece can safely say that there is not a single song out there which can top any one of these.

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Courtney Barnett – Charity

Courtney Barnett is a treasure, for she brings to the world joy and hope, perhaps even happiness, with her music. Barnett sing-speaks over folksy guitar lines, interspersing a postmodern sense of casual detachment, wit, and irony with an intimate, rambly, endearing, confessional, storytelling mode of delivery; it’s a unique style that’s won the Aussie singer-songwriter many loyal fans. Her second album, 2018’s Tell Me How You Really Feel, sees Barnett taking a slightly more measured, maybe even polished, approach, yet it retains the carefree essence that props up her music. It remains as thrilling and free as ever.

‘Charity’, unlike her chattier, more ponderous treks, is focused and structurally concise, though her ability to pack in generous textual detail between the lines—even within confined structures—shines through here as well. It has a huge chorus, with a very high singalong quotient, and big guitars and drums. Again, it’s superficially a whopping alternative rock song, almost Nirvana-like in spirit, but Barnett elevates, or resists, or inverts, conventional genre labels through her signature creative voice. “You don’t have to pretend you’re not scared / everyone else is just as terrified as you”, she sings, reminding the listener, and herself, to take a breath.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtzIKH_sZRw

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Childish Gambino – This Is America

‘This Is America’ is an Important song; for an American audience, it’s arguably the most important song of the year. In an exhausting and increasingly volatile year—you know, politically and shit—Childish Gambino released what has to be described as a Statement, a critique of modern society at large. Its fiery video, which is almost impossible to separate from the song itself (and has some 440 million views on YouTube and over half a million comments) leaves a chilling impact with the sardonic commentary it offers on racism and gun culture in America. The song, too, shuttles in moods from the joyful, frolicking cold open to an increasingly sinister trap rhythm that drives it toward its intended goal. The contrast, aesthetically, is so perfectly in sync with the meaning of the words here. Each time Childish Gambino takes a gun and shoots someone in the video, the song flips, ditching its playful energy emphatically as he declares, over a drilling bassline: “This is America / Don’t catch you slippin’ up / Look at how I’m livin’ now / Police be trippin’ now / Yeah, this is America.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOjWnS4cMY

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Thom Yorke – Unmade

With the reluctant admission that Radiohead as a band no longer rule the world of radical experimentation—that most of their latter-day forays are still broadly challenging and ever so scintillating, but somewhat self-limiting in design—there’s no denying that Thom Yorke is a beautiful bastard. Even in 2018, he’s messing about like he always has, as the score for horror remake Suspiria so clearly displays. But we’re reserving a spot on this list for one of the few song-songs from the soundtrack, ‘Unmade’. It’s classic Yorke: some background strings and a mischievous, flittering piano line, over which Yorke juggles both his regular human voice and his superhuman falsetto, assuring the listener that “there’s nothing under my sleeves”. Tangentially, I happen to believe that Yorke has one of the most sublimely ‘musical’ voices ever and, as he ages—he’s 50 now—the slight cracks and shivers that have started to appear add an entire new dimension to his melodies, a quality he seems to have harnessed in his new works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0ueIcYrOmo

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Jonny Greenwood – House Of Woodcock

While we’re on the subject, ‘House Of Woodcock’ is gorgeous and ever so fluffy. Delightful piano melodies hold this piece together, keeping at bay the threat of the big strings and the wailing violas in the back, showcasing yet another side to Greenwood’s formidable compositional repertoire. Greenwood, also known as the floppy-haired guitar player from Radiohead, has in his own right become one of the most important voices in film music, thanks in no small part to his regular collaborations with filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. The latest in that very fruitful partnership is the Daniel Day-Lewis (of “SLLLRRRP I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!” fame) starrer Phantom Thread, the soundtrack for which sees Greenwood deviating from his previously established trope of resonant tension for a more expansive, big-hearted, colourful, sort of cloud-like motif here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT_XjcdgT6g

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Aphex Twin – T69

Like all things Aphex Twin, ‘T69’, too, is a clusterfudge. A journey into parts of the brain that should ideally remain sealed shut. There’s the dizzying video with its rapidfire technicolour visualisations, which—to my untrained eyes—seems to illustrate the slow collapse of a digital civilisation. (Just to drive home the point, the video is made by Weirdcore.)

Then the song itself, which begins like any garden-variety Aphex Twin blip-bloopy song would, with a shit-ton of breakbeats and stuttering sounds and all those accompanying shenanigans. But then it persists, piling on layer upon sonically protesting layer, building up a mood of palpable tension that really needs breaking. Which the song duly does, pricking it casually in its final third, morphing into a more serene, more relaxed entity, and offering the listener some comfort and respite—a breather, perhaps—at the end of an exacting excursion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqayDnQ2wmw

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Vennart – Immortal Soldiers

‘Immortal Soldiers’ is a fucking whirlwind. It’s hard to quite capture the immensity of the song, part of the new solo album by former Oceansize frontman and strident cult hero for a very vocal generation of fans of alternative and progressive rock, Mike Vennart. But let’s give it a try nevertheless. Loosely, it qualifies as progressive, psychedelic-ish, alternative guitar rock. There’s so much to unpack here in terms of songwriting craft, or arrangement, or structure, or the interplay between the instruments and the voice, or that absurd mid-song departure into a startlingly unexpected direction—it’s one of those special songs inside which you discover something new with each subsequent listen.

But let’s skip all that. What sets apart ‘Immortal Soldiers’, for me at least, is that, underneath it all lies just a really great song written with absolute honesty. It has heart. In a vocal performance that must rank somewhere near the top of a two-decade-long career, Vennart goes all out, singing with a kind of primeval emotion—roaring out each syllable, amping up his already hyperarticulate style of delivery—that eludes description. It’s one of those things you just end up feeling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkc9A_wDh08

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Mogwai – Scrap

Yet another entry from the world of film music. I guess the jig is up: I listen to lots of film scores. Though in fairness, Scottish post-rock band Mogwai’s regular work often overlaps with their film work, to the point where it’s hard to tell which is which. ‘Scrap’, from their soundtrack for KIN, loosely recalls elements from their phenomenal Les Revenants album, as a kind, compassionate spread of piano notes washes over everything. Underneath it lie the synths, adamant tremolo-picked guitar notes, this stubborn, horn-like effect, drums played with great care and restraint, all in nonchalant interplay with each other. The song comes together and falls apart at various different points, treading around a deliberate path with a detached purposelessness. And just before that point of completion, it stops. It finishes. ‘Scrap’ isn’t even three minutes long, which is a shame, but in that short burst alone it creates its own world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zayGQFA953g

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Mitski – A Pearl

There’s something surreal about Mitski’s voice. She has a Beatles-esque flair for bright, well-crafted melodies plotted out over the guitar or piano. The undercurrent of sadness and self-reflection, both in her words and her unpredictable delivery, often hides the sheer calmness with which she sings. That dichotomy, that principal contrast which feels critical to any understanding of the Japanese-American singer-songwriter’s fascinating career trajectory, often makes for an uneasy (and rewarding) experience. On the hook-heavy ‘A Pearl’, she describes a toxic, abusive relationship—“Sorry I don’t want your touch,” she sings, “it’s not that I don’t want you / Sorry I can’t take your touch”— with a piercing determination, even as the song around her disintegrates. From its innocuous openings, sung over guitar chords strummed casually, the song continues to build and crumble, peaking with a loud, alt-rock chorus backed by howling guitars and Mitski Miyawaki’s intense, steely delivery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJA0xN-0k8

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Low – Fly

Marking their 25th anniversary, Low gave us the exquisite and much-revered Double Negative this year, a fluid, 11-song exploration of florid ambient pop punctuated by lo-fi, desolate, static interjections and departures. All the while, the synergic harmonies of founding members and husband-wife duo Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker form the heart of this record.

It’s one of those albums that flows seamlessly from one song to the next, best appreciated as a large whole, rather than a collection of individual songs. That said, it does have plenty of standout singles too, one of which happens to be ‘Fly’. This one, with a slightest of nods to trip-hop, is driven by Parker’s choral delivery and the gently insistent percussion at the back. “Well, I don’t know / And I don’t mind / Take my weary bones / And fly”, she sings. And she means it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5Enxzh-O9Y

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Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Motel & Casino

The Monkeys, and their greasy frontman in particular, have this special talent of seeming like trendy, manipulative, cunning, chameleon-like, slithering, wind-up-merchant knobheads. And somehow still writing nauseatingly sincere and honest songs. And still writing songs that rock. I can never decide between being a loyal champion of the band and the fun routes they often head off into, or a lifetime skeptic barking relentlessly at their whole shtick. They ditched the rock this year, going instead for a sexier, shimmering, speakeasy energy, alienating plenty of fans in the process. The titular single is both proof of concept of the leftfield direction the new record takes, as well as a droopy reminder that Alex Turner and friends remain really very gifted songwriters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXuUAtAtMtM

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An edited version of this first appeared in Open magazine.  

時の洗礼を受けていないものを読むな: My White Whale (Or: Don't read things that have not had the baptism of time)

Many years ago — 2012, I think — I was living in an apartment in Bombay on Veera Desai Road. My room had a tiny balcony, which had been invaded by a family of pigeons that I hated very much. One evening, my two flatmates were watching some music video on repeat in one of the other guys’ room. I was feeling left out so I joined in. It was some slow-motion thing that they — film-school alumni which they were — were drooling over. It was nice, like one of those short films you can’t understand but it keeps you gripped.

The artist was Flying Lotus. The song was called ‘Hunger’. Somewhere around the two-minute mark, the song flipped on its head, ditching its previously established languid indolence. It went into this disconnected and ridiculously beautiful fingerpicked guitar bit. I knew I’d heard it before. I knew it. I KNEW IT. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where in hell I’d heard it. This is the problem with listening to a lot of instrumental music: when you hear something, you don’t have a distinct voice attached to it; there’s no Aadhar no. identifying the artist on first glance. So you have to force your brain to think.

By the second or third viewing, I knew — I. Fucking. Knew. — that this little guitar line on a Flying Lotus song had something to do with Radiohead. A) Because of my obsession with Radiohead, most things eventually circle back to the band. But more importantly, B) I’d read of some link between FlyLo and Radiohead — that Radiohead were fans and had helped him get some media attention, or the other way round. Or something. Just that there was a connection.

It became a tic. This happens often with me, and just about everyone I know. Where you’re out, randomly enjoying or hating the shit out of life, and then suddenly this incomplete fact pops into your head and you have to complete it. So you try Google (previously known as an encyclopedia), you Phone-A-Friend, you throw a fit. Whatever it takes.

This live-screening that I was a part of, which set off my psychosis, took placed late in the night, at like 1 a.m. or something. I left that room irritated, scratching my arms and head. I went back into my room and destroyed my night.

Here’s what I did: I listened to every single Radiohead song there is in existence. In chronological order. Whatever MP3s I didn’t have, I YouTubed (in those pre-Spotify days). Of course, I didn’t listen to each song from start to finish; I skimmed through most of them. But I made sure to cover all the different parts — the intros, the choruses, the verses, the unexpected discursion, the extended bridges and outros. With every passing album, as I neared the completion of their discography as well as the impending sunrise, I got more and more agitated. Mentally of course, but it was also physically uncomfortable. This was the least fun I’d ever had listening to Radiohead, and I’d had some terrible times listening to them in the past.

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Anyway, this went on for what seemed like forever. I thought of giving up in between; I took a short break that could have become an indefinite one had I not been such an idiot. Eventually, I was done with Radiohead. I’d aged 10 years: my joints hurt, my hair — whatever hadn’t fallen out — had turned grey; I was yelling at kids that didn’t exist. It was the worst.

But I soldiered on. This was my white whale. I moved on from Radiohead to band member Jonny Greenwood. I’ve been an obsessive fan of his for donkey’s years as well, and I was at this point still 100% certain that I’d find that damn guitar line. I heard his score to Bodysong, and didn’t find it. I moved on to There Will Be Blood, knowing fully well that there was no bloody way I’d find it on it; that was the last one (this was before Inherent Vice or even The Master had come out). I was losing hope when, out of nowhere, I thought of checking out his obscure score for Norwegian Wood, a 2010 Japanese film adapted from the novel.

I had to hunt through my laptop to find the folder that had the album. Here’s the thing: the song titles for his Norwegian Wood score are all in Japanese which, cool as it is, makes it a nightmare to keep track of songs. So I had to listen to every single song on it from start to finish, waiting patiently, knowing that I’d find it. Or that I’d be found out finally.

By around the middle of the album... boom! There it was. It’s a song called, well, something in Japanese. It's just a two-minute guitar line that goes on for a few bars and, once it’s done its job, it goes away. Never before or since have I felt so triumphant, so relieved. And so sleepy. The sun was out.

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Epilogue: As the story goes, Jonny Greenwood’s score for the latest PTA film, Phantom Thread, is releasing on January 12. They’ve just put out a new song off it, called ‘House Of Woodcock’, and it’s quite something. Also, the name of the white whale song is translated to “Don’t read things that have not had the baptism of time”.

x

How long must I wait, before the thrill is gone?

Is Beck OK? Hearing his new album, Colors, I can’t tell. It’s lively; it keeps bouncing and hitting peaks in unexpected places. Joy and melancholy are in combat with each other incessantly: On the one hand is Beck’s effortless ability to craft infectious pop melodies that — in a rare twist — have a quality of freshness and originality to them. On the other is his flaneur-like gift of seeking out unfamiliar musical spaces, almost to a fault. It falls into place often, none more so than on the album opener, ‘Colors’ (the missing “U” is infuriating). The euphoria of the chorus is checked almost immediately by the agitated key shift it’s in rotation with. There’s lots of these uneasy moments all over that give the seemingly straightforward structures a trademark edge, the getting into of which isn’t the purpose here.

Instead, it’s a sincere feeling of concern for Beck. While I’d always known of his existence — checking out the odd song here and there and dismissing it out of a misplaced musical snobbery — I properly discovered Beck’s music earlier this year, at some point in February, with the album Odelay. His ability to shift gears and head off in unpredictable sonic directions was a revelatory experience. The shape-shifting is sneaky, chameleon-like behaviour, no doubt, and he deserves a slap for never giving the listener a moment of familiarity and comfort. (No, I’m being facetious.) But it’s also what made his music exhilarating — no, liberating — for me, both from the point of view of a new listener and as an artist. (Artist? No, I mean artiste.)

Hooked (lined and sinkered), I started to get into his other works. What I found was an almost stubbornness, a resistance to conformity, often for the sake of it. I found an artist who was infinitely restless — a theme I visit often while writing about music — and endlessly seeking new delights in new sounds. The form shifted — from experimental rap-rock to disco to alt-rock to pop to acoustic, folksy ramblings — and the tools at his disposal were replaced and rearranged with every release, but what stayed consistent was his aesthetic impatience, the underlying twitch that guides his art. Across like a shitload of albums, Beck has somehow managed to redefine himself for himself each time.

(What I refer to here isn’t the avant-garde but a hyper-experimentation within sounds that are recognised as somewhat conventional, or at least conventional-adjacent; basically, a mangling of old tropes, both an embrace and a defiant rejection of convention.)

To present day, where Colors has come out. Structurally, this record is more self-contained than a lot of his more radical ventures, in that it prefers to roam around within the wide-enough confines of disco, pop, funk, alt-rock, the occasional rap bits, and what can best be described as Beck-rock. (At times, he even sounds, here, like Daft Punk or Depeche Mode, but much, much, much better.)

But even with these supposed limitations — and without discounting the fact that Colors does boast the odd clunker or two, ‘No Distraction’ chief among those that reach a kind of ska-reggae accessibility usually reserved for much less gifted artists than Beck — it still wanders enough, throwing these bizarre curveballs (like the percussive rapping on ‘I’m So Free’, followed by the chorus blitz, or the push-pull interplay of ‘Wow’) by the dozens.

Which makes me wonder about Beck Hanson the individual behind all the music and the weird dances. Mental health is no laughing matter (well, it is, but laughing matters are very serious matters too; though that’s a discussion best left for an undetermined date in the future). With Beck, the fact that he’s pretty much impossible to read as an artist; he's an enigma, a mystery, a closed book; he's indecipherable — where I understand little to no nothing about his motivations except to just be constantly outrageous in whatever avatar he chooses to adopt — makes me fear for his sanity a little. 

See, what really sets him apart is the versatility in his art. He’s not sticking to any kind of tradition or discipline; he sounds like someone who’s constantly looking for the next buzz, the next kick, the next fix. It’s worked for over two decades, so there’s something to be said for commitment.

But then, what happens when it stops giving him the childlike happiness he quite clearly gets from his art. He’s been getting increasingly defeatist, grumbly, cantankerous, withdrawn, as an artist in the public eye (sort of).

Me being someone who knows a fair bit about existential bitterness, about getting stuck creatively, about banging my head against a wall over and over again with the expectation that the wall will crack, not my own skull, I feel a kind of projected concern for Beck. This is a challenge literally every given artist will face in her life, repeatedly if she’s dedicated to her craft, and I can safely say it’s something that torments Beck too. But he’s somehow found a way to crack that wall so consistently for so long. But what happens when it stops working for him? Is it, as I worry, an ephemeral state? Or does there exist a state of permanent restlessness and reward and failure? Will he short-circuit?

As he sings on ‘Dear Life’ here, “Dear Life, I’m holding / How long must I wait / Before the thrill is gone?” As he sang on ‘Modern Guilt’ off Modern Guilt, “Don’t know what I’ve done but I feel ashamed,” and then later: “Don’t know what I’ve done but I feel afraid.” So I worry, but then the excitement of “what next” is as rewarding for him (I hope) as it is for me.