Over the past month, it would appear that the word “nonchalance” is making a comeback into the vocabularies of the youth. It surprised me for two reasons. First, because it’s hard to spell, and the word that was on their lips prior to that was “Rizz”, which I assumed was a contraction of “charisma”, and…
Author: MiddleRabbiting
Pointy nosed twat. Sad Greyhound Face. Dying At Sea.
You & Your Sister. Or, Why Kim Deal, Margaret Atwood And Female Humour Are More Interesting Than Earnest Masculinity.
I started writing this because I enjoy writing about records I’m enjoying at the time. I often don’t really know what I think about anything until I start writing it down because I can’t type as fast as I can think, and slowing down my thoughts helps me pay attention to them, because otherwise I…
Nostalgia For Cold, Rainy, Dark Days in England in The 1970s, Part 3: Pickettywitch – That Same Old Feeling.
In a lot of ways, everything I’m writing about in this little series could be comfortably filed under “Kitsch”, and I don’t mind that. I mean, it doesn’t bother me. I like this sort of thing – disposable pop music of the late sixties/early 70s, especially the English take on it, which was always a…
N-N-N-N-Nineteen Vietnam Films: Part One, The Deer Hunter. Or, One Wedding, Three Amputations, And A Funeral.
Vietnam was ubiquitous in popular culture in the 1980s. This is the first in a series of essays about how Hollywood tried to deal with America’s failure to address its hubristic approach to everything it does.
An Adolescence In Corduroy: Jingly Jangly Indie Wank In The 1980s, Part 2 – The House of Love.
Things happened a lot faster in the 1980s. Sort of. In terms of musical scenes and tribes, the tide went in and out rapidly in some ways, and barely at all in others. Seismic shifts didn’t really happen, but the undercurrents of what was deemed fashionable by the weekly music press inevitably moved more rapidly…
Hey Nonny, It’s Raining. Good Morning Rain, Early Morning Rain and Leaving On A Jet Plane. Tolerable Folk Music, part 6.
Good Morning Rain’s a melancholy song, and when I say melancholy, I mean when things are a bit shit, but you still quite enjoy it.
Nostalgia For Cold, Rainy, Dark Days in England in The 1970s, Part 2: Beach Baby – The First Class.
Where do you start with Beach Baby by The First Class? There’s a lot going on in there. When I hear Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, I gather the studio kitchen’s a sink down. When I hear Beach Baby, it sounds like they’ve made a studio out kitchen sinks, specifically to record a song that is, equally, if not more, no stranger to the plumbing aisle in B&Q.
An Adolescence In Corduroy: Jingly Jangly Indie Wank In The 1980s, Part 1 – The Primitives.
Up to about fourteen, I didn’t realise that there was a modern alternative to pop music that got in the charts. That’s not all that surprising really, because I also hadn’t realised that you could go into a record shop and buy whatever records you wanted either. Then I saw The Smiths on Top of…
Nostalgia For Cold, Rainy, Dark Days in England in The 1970s, Part 1: Brotherhood of Man – Angelo.
As usual, it takes me a long time to work out what cleverer people understand instantly. What that means is that I’ve realised that I’m quite a nostalgic person and, ironically, always have been. Maybe that’s the real point – because I’m a bit on the slow side, I’m always trying to work out what…
Hey Nonny, Odds & Sods: Tolerable Folk Music, Part 5
As regular readers of this blog/website/whatever it is will have worked out by now, I have an awkward relationship with Folk Music in the same sort of way that I have awkward sorts of relationships with most things. Everything, probably. Like I said last time, I think I’m probably a bit brain damaged. I’m not…
MiddleRabbiting 