The Specials: Gangsters

"Gangsters" was The Specials' debut single back in 1979 when it went to number 6 in the UK chart. The Specials formation was intrinsically linked to anti-racism. The article below from icrates.org describes their link to the Rock Against Racism movement...

The Specials and Rock Against Racism

Posted by Gabriella Geisinger and Emily Hayes on February 17, 2012 in Articles, Magazine, Resistance Music

Over time the entire body of work of any given musical artist becomes boiled down to a specific purpose; sometimes a specific song. History allows us to look back and classify, often also to simplify in order to better understand. The Specials are a band that time has been kind to; a band whose formation, raison d’être, message, and musical achievements are focused around anti-racism. In 1976, England saw an uptick in white nationalism, and the campaign Rock Against Racism was created to steer young people away from racist sentiments. The Specials were instrumental to the Rock Against Racism movement.

The Specials uniqueness comes hand in hand with the simplicity of their goal: to form a mix-race Ska/2 Tone band. Founder Jerry Dammers’ desire to be part of a political movement meant that the band needed to embody the change it wanted to see. If their band could survive as a multi-ethnic entity, so could Great Britain. Kids across from all backgrounds could pick up The Specials’ LP (cleverly entitled Specials) and see someone who looked just like them. What’s more, they made music that sounded cool; and, in 1970’s England, that was all every rude-boy cared about. You could listen to “Too Much Too Young” and groove – while lyrics promoting contraception (a very radical idea for the late 1970s) were etched into your brain. And when you said to your friend “check out this cool song by The Specials!” you were inadvertently promoting the progressive ideals the band espoused. I mean, hey, what’s cooler than singing about birth control?

In this regard, The Specials were genius. Propelled by word of mouth through the sheer popularity of their songs, the growing momentum of Rock Against Racism and identifiable with rude-boy/mod fashion, The Specials married commercial success with progressive political drive.

They continued to gain political acclaim with the song “Free Nelson Mandela” off their second album (aptly titled More Specials). Despite the album’s waning commercial success, “Free Nelson Mandela” became an anthem for the Anti-Apartheid movement. (Although it would take another six years after the release of “Free Nelson Mandela” to free Nelson Mandela).

All of this is intrinsic to the story of The Specials (and their reunion in 2009, without Jerry Dammers). What makes it interesting now is this: when a magazine like The New Statesmen compiles its Top 20 Political Songs (“Free Nelson Mandela” ranks second behind “This Land is Your Land”), where do we have to go? In 2007 I made my way to Washington D.C. for an anti-war rally. We marched through the streets with a mobile stereo system under their campaign of “Funk the War”. Who’s music did we play? It was not our own – it was from bands like The Specials and the rest of top twenty list.

In the England of Jerry Dammers’ heyday the issues were black and white. What type of band would he have assembled today in the face of these murky socio-political, economically and environmentally unstable times? It would have to be a 600-piece orchestra. I hope The Specials are willing to expand.

From: http://www.icrates.org/the-specials-and-rock-against-racism/ 

Cardiologists say listening to music is good for the heart

September 2, 2013 19:32

Cardiologists say listening to music is good for the heart

A clinical trial found that music boosts exercise capacity

Photo: PA

A new study has found that listening to music is good for your heart.

The report, which was delivered at the European Society of Cardiology's annual congress in Amsterdam, showed that music aided the recovery of patients with heart disease, and some cardiologists have also said that everyone can help their heart health by listening to music, reports the Telegraph.

The trial saw 74 people with cardiac disease put into three groups. Two groups took exercise classes for three weeks with one group also asked to listen to any music of their choosing for half an hour a day. A third and final group did not take part in any exercise, but simply listened to music. The group who listened to music and exercised improved their exercise capacity by 39 per cent and also showed significant, positive changes in heart function. 

Meanwhile, the group who just exercised improved their capacity by 29 per cent and the group who didn't exercise at all, only listened to music, still improved their function by 19 per cent. 

Prof Delijanin Ilic from the Institute of Cardiology, University of Nis, Serbia, said that it doesn't matter what music you listen to – just as long as you enjoy it: "When we listen to music we like then endorphins are released from the brain and this improves our vascular health. There is no 'best music' for everyone - what matters is what the person likes and makes them happy."

from  http://www.nme.com/news/various-artists/72414#czhYOlhGgDRwTSqQ.99

The Real Harlem Shake

My facebook friend Vincent brought this to my attention - the real Harlem Shake and its cultural significance on MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry: 

http://uptownmagazine.com/2013/08/rihanna-goes-to-carnival-and-americans-react-with-disrespect/

There's a great example of the real Shake at 2:45 minutes into the video in the above link.

And here's an article from The New York Times discussing the real Harlem Shake and its origins.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/nyregion/behind-harlem-shake-craze-a-dance-thats-over-a-decade-old.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Billboard Hot 100 55th Anniversary 'By The Numbers' Top 100 Artists etc.

Hot 100 55th Anniversary By The Numbers: Top 100 Artists, Most No. 1s, Biggest No. 2s & More

In the course of charting over a half-century of music, the Billboard Hot 100 -- which now celebrates its 55th anniversary -- has seen some songs transform into hits, but it has also chronicled major chart feats. So in addition to the Hot 100 55th anniversary All-Time Top 100 Songs list, we've delved into the Hot 100's rich history to take a look, by the numbers, at the chart's Top 100 artists, the artists with the most Hot 100 No. 1's and top tens, the artists with the most overall Hot 100 hits, the biggest No. 2 hits, and more.

Click on the link to go to the full article:

http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/5557800/hot-100-55th-anniversary-by-the-numbers-top-100-artists-most-no

6th Borough Project: If The Feelings Right

This great track has an equally great video. The music is best described as 'discosouljazzfunk' and the cute video shows a man and woman getting prepared and then heading out to Glasgow's legendary Grand Ole Opry which was founded as a Country and Western Club in 1974 and is apparently the biggest club of its kind in the Europe.

http://www.glasgowsgrandoleopry.co.uk/history.htm

Special AKA: Nelson Mandella (Free Nelson Mandella)

On the way back from the cinema last night this came on the radio and I love it so much I took a note to blog it. This song really raised my awareness of Nelson Mandella and the anti-apartheid movement back in 1984 when it was released as a single in the UK. It still sounds fantastic today. I also love that when Amy Winehouse sang this at the Nelson Mandella 90th birthday tribute in London she apparently substituted some of the 'Free Nelson Mandella' lyrics for her own 'Free Blakey My Fella' line in support of her imprisoned boyfriend! I miss Amy.

The New Statesman listed "Nelson Mandella" as one of their top 20 political songs in 2010. This is what they had to say:

Top 20 Political Songs: Free Nelson Mandela | The Special AKA | 1984

BY JENNIFER THOMPSON PUBLISHED 25 MARCH 2010

First performed by the Coventry-based band The Special AKA, "Free Nelson Mandela" was released in 1984 as a protest against the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela who had by then spent 22 years in prison.

The composer Jerry Dammers, who played keyboard and wrote lyrics for the band, admitted he had known little of Mandela's situation until the previous year, and his song's success took him by surprise. Having imposed a ban on sporting engagements with South Africa during the 1950s and 1960s, and joined UN sanctions as a condemnation of the apartheid regime, Britain, under Margaret Thatcher, was pursuing a more moderate line in the early Eighties, mirroring US policy.

The song reached No 9 in the UK charts and was immensely popular in Africa, where it was played at ANC rallies. More recently, a version was performed at the finale of the Nelson Mandela 90th birthday tribute in London's Hyde Park, in June 2008. Mandela became the first black president of South Africa in 1994, four years after his release from prison.

To check out the rest of the New Statesman list click on the link:

http://www.newstatesman.com/music/2010/03/top-20-political-songs

Pop's uncanny ability to help us define and understand our lives makes it more powerful than film or books

'We mix ourselves up with music, it moulds itself to us'

Pop's uncanny ability to help us define and understand our lives makes it more powerful than film or books

• 
• • Miranda Sawyer
  • The Observer, Sunday 7 April 2013
  • 
    

Morrissey and Johnny Marr of the Smiths. 'I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard How Soon Is Now', says Miranda Sawyer. Photograph: Paul Slattery

Recently, I thought I'd listen to a song I hadn't heard in a while. Mary Lou Lord's version of Bob Dylan's You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go is one of my favourites. It's a live recording, her perfect, almost childlike voice and acoustic guitar adding sweetness to Dylan's heartbreak classic. So, I cued it up on my phone, whacked up the volume... But I had to stop listening. Gulping sobs on the 159 bus are OK, but not if you're out of tissues and have to use an empty Tangfastics packet to mop your snot.

We all have songs that are so wrapped around our lives that they stop being just songs and become something else. Something more integral to us, like extra DNA, or special blood. Sometimes such songs choose you: I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard How Soon Is Now by the Smiths (my school common room, after school had shut: I was looking for a bag and it came on the radio). I remember that because I couldn't believe how amazing it sounded. Sometimes you choose the songs: you make up a Spotify list, aka a mixtape, for someone special, or you choose the tracklist for a party, a wedding, a funeral, a birth. Songs can be emotional doctors, or emotional shortcuts:Sabotage by Beastie Boys is an instant joy kick for me, a rush of adrenaline and fight-f**k energy. It makes me want to drive my car into a wall. These are the ones that really become part of you.

The Mary Lou Lord song made me cry because I listened to it over and over when my granny died. I can still hear it perfectly in my head, though that doesn't have the same insta-tears effect. I can hear Lord's lingering "high" on "high above", her clipped consonants when she sings "correct", the pause before the last "you're gonna make me lonesome". All beautiful. It's a gorgeous piece of music.

It's also, very clearly, a song about a lost lover. Not a dead granny. Lord did not have a 101-year-old northern Englishwoman with a strong resemblance to Thora Hird in mind when she sang it; nor Dylan when he wrote it. Yet that song helped me through my grief. It captures the pain of a final separation, the not-quite acceptance, the wishing to let go and hoping never to: "You're gonna have to leave me now, I know/ But I'll see you in the skies above, in the tall grass and the ones I love." It doesn't matter that it's not about family love, or ageing, or death.

And that's the thing about music, anyway. It's yours. Films and books tell a specific narrative; they're pinned to their characters, the story, the pretty scenery, the tying up of plot lines into a lovely bow. The best of them can become part of your life, too: you quote lines from Withnail, you dress like Steve McQueen or Rizzo from Grease, Renton's opening speech in Trainspotting sums up how you feel about modern society. But that's just sampling, really. It's not owning. There's more room for us inside music, and more room for music inside us; we can interpret a guitar's howl, a descending bassline, an intake of breath in any way we want. We can take that meaning with us, hug it close. When we mix ourselves up with music, music moulds itself to us.

Now that music is easy to access, in our lives all the time whether we want it there or not, there's an assumption that it has lost its power. And it has, if you look to pop for revolution, for shock, manifesto, style, for a uniting of outsiders into a force for change. (All things I still hope for, though I know I'm kidding myself.) Music is too mainstream to kick anything over these days. But if you move away from the tribe, if you tuck yourself into your own small corner of the world, then music is still as potent as ever. If you're inarticulate with emotion, if you can't understand what's going on, there exists a piece of music that can untangle your feelings better than you ever can.

The older I get, the more I find that amazing. I've been writing about music for 25 years, listening for as long as I remember, and I still don't understand how music works. How can an intentional vibration of air waves, a combination of noise and not-noise, reach so deeply into our beings, stir up feelings of fear and fight and remorse and delight and sex? How does music do that? Not all music has that effect, of course – I don't recall ever having my soul shivered by My Chemical Romance, or anything involving bagpipes – but all music moves the very essence of someone, somewhere out there.

These days, when I'm confronted with a problem that requires more than Dr Google to sort it out, I turn to music. I play a song that I love, or one I don't quite understand, I ask my husband to play me some of the weird Appalachian folk stuff he likes, or I go to YouTube and just scrabble about a bit, checking out old Sam and Dave live performances or new grimey-housey-what-is-that? tracks. It all helps. After that, I try to talk to other people cleverer than me: not necessarily about whatever I'm worried about. Usually, something comes out of that. I don't talk to people who don't like music though. We have nothing in common.

This is all a long-winded way of saying, I'm glad I have the job I do. Pop journalism might seem increasingly irrelevant but talking to musicians – clever, emotional, music-loving people – can be very enlightening. (Especially if you talk about something other than their most recent piece of work.) I've just made four programmes for 6 Music on four different themes: separation, calculation, trepidation, jubilation. In each one, I talk to musicians, and music-loving non-musicians, and I play songs that seem relevant. So writer Irvine Welsh talks about merging and separating from his characters; film director Ben Wheatley explains that a film without music can't ever be scary; Dave Rowntree from Blur talks maths and radio; artist Jeremy Deller talks about how he sees pop as an art form as important as any other, and why, despite this, he feels he should be banned from certain gigs. I play the Pixies, PJ Harvey, Beck, the xx, Fiona Apple, Joy Division, Basement Jaxx, Al Green, Violent Femmes, a Space Invaders track and the Williams Fairey Brass Band performing Royal House's Can You Party?. Also, the Mary Lou Lord song.

I have no idea if this will help anyone understand anything. Even if it doesn't, at least the people I talk to are all interesting. And maybe I'll play a song that gets you, that you get, that is yours, or becomes yours. The other day, I played the Prodigy's Firestarter to my seven-year-old son. Within 10 seconds, he started throwing himself around the room in a complicated, furious, jumpy dance. (Pretty much exactly what I do to Sabotage.) He'd never heard the song before, but when it finished, he immediately wanted to hear it again. And again. And again. "That whhrrrggggh noise makes me feel brilliant, Mum," he said. "I'm a firestarter."

David Bowie: Golden Years (Tim Fuchs Edit)

Great mix of David Bowie's "Golden Years" by Tim Fuchs.

Also I'm currently reading David Bowie's biography Starman which is excellent. I'm going to try to get to the Bowie exhibition in London this Summer. If I do I'll let you know all about it.  Here's the Guardian review of Starman...

Starman: David Bowie by Paul Trynka; Any Day Now by Kevin Cann – reviews

Two Bowie biographies shed new light on the career of pop's greatest chameleon, but the man himself remains elusive

• 
  
• 
  
  

• Sean O'Hagan
• The Observer, Sunday 13 March 2011
• 
  

Angie, Zowie (aka Duncan Jones) and David Bowie at a press conference in Amsterdam, 1974. Photograph: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

In 1971, David Bowie's bullish new manager, Tony Defries, walked into the office of RCA in New York for a meeting with the heads of a record label whose biggest star was Elvis Presley. "You've had nothing since the 1950s," Defries informed them, employing a confrontational stance that may well have been borrowed from one of his role models, Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, "but you can own the 1970s, because David Bowie is going to remake the decade, just like the Beatles did in the 1960s."

1. Starman: David Bowie - The Definitive Biography
2. by Paul Trynka

Defries, for all his bluster, was right. David Bowie's golden years lasted from November 1970, when he released his first cohesive album, The Man Who Sold the World, until September 1980, when he released Scary Monsters...and Super Creeps, which is generally regarded as the last great album by an artist who, despite the relentless attention-seeking of Lady Gaga, remains the greatest shape-shifter in pop music. In between came a run of albums that saw Bowie adopt and, just as quickly, cast off a range of personas that kept both fans and critics guessing about the nature of his identity, his sexuality, and his complex relationship with pop stardom.

Bowie's breakthrough album, the glam sci-fi fantasy that was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), precipitated a wave of fan hysteria that, indeed, harked back to Beatlemania, but also signalled the darker, often sexually ambivalent, energies of the punk-rock revolution of the late 1970s. By then, Bowie had explored the contradictions of celebrity (Aladdin Sane, 1973), made a dystopian concept album based on George Orwell's 1984 (Diamond Dogs, 1974), reinvented himself as a blue-eyed soul singer (Young Americans, 1975), tentatively embraced electronic experimentation on Station to Station(1976) and emerged, on Low and Heroes, both released in 1977 as punk challenged rock's old guard, as an experimental art-rocker without peer.

Nothing that Bowie has done since has come close to equalling the artistic momentum and relentless reinvention he achieved during that decade, but he remains one of the key, and defining, figures in pop, and one whose influence can be detected in most of the groundbreaking music that has been made since, from the U2 of Achtung Baby andZooropa to Arcade Fire on their most recent album, The Suburbs, from Joy Division to Lady Gaga in all her guises. Yet, David Bowie, the great chameleon of pop, as both these books attest, remains somehow unknowable.

Paul Trynka has done a stalwart job of tracing Bowie's many musical shifts and performing personas, but the man himself remains alarmingly elusive, just as he did in the last major biography, Marc Spitz's David Bowie: A Biography, published in Britain last year. Like Spitz, Trynka did not have direct access to his subject, nor to some important Bowie friends-come-collaborators such as Brian Eno, who helped shape Bowie's vision on Low and Heroes.

For Starman, the press release asserts, Trykna interviewed "over 200 friends, ex-lovers and fellow musicians". As befits an erstwhile editor ofMojo, a magazine that tends to approach rock music as first and foremost a heritage industry, he is good on the musical development of a pop star whose early albums, David Bowie (1967) and Space Oddity(1969), were both little more than confused collections of ill-matched songs, and showed little hint of the confidence and brilliance that was to follow. Beginning with Bowie's childhood as plain David Jones in post-war Brixton, Trynka tells a tale that has perhaps been told too often to surprise anymore, but that nevertheless intrigues in its mixture of ruthlessness, shifting loyalties, monumental drug taking, decadent behaviour and, for a while, undiminished musical invention.

The cast of characters is colourful-going-on-exotic, and includes Lindsay Kemp, the mime artist whose hold on Bowie was such that he almost forsook pop music for interpretative dance; Iggy Pop, Bowie's long-time friend, rival and a performer whose unlikely artistic resurrection in the late-70s was orchestrated by Bowie as well as Angie Bowie, nee Barnett, his first wife, would-be manager and fellow sexual adventurer. There are also several less well known but no less intriguing walk-on characters such as Daniella Parmar, an androgynous beauty whose cropped and dyed hairstyle seems to have been the template for Ziggy Stardust's barnet, and Vince Taylor, the 50s rocker whose fall from grace underpinned the album's overall concept.

Trynka also delves deeply and illuminatingly into Bowie's prolonged cocaine addiction, which, at its height, shocked even Iggy, whose own appetite for destruction was legendary. You can catch a glimpse of Bowie at his most strung-out in Alan Yentob's film Cracked Actor, first shown on the BBC in 1974 and now available via YouTube. Trynka trails an unravelling Bowie though his cocaine-fuelled obsession with the occult and his cocaine-addled outburst of megalomania during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1976, in which he name-checked Hitler and said, "I'd adore to be prime minister. And, I believe very strongly in fascism... I dream of buying companies and TV stations, owning and controlling them." (That same year, Bowie was captured on camera giving what looked like a Nazi salute, but which was more likely an innocent wave, to a crowd of fans at Victoria station. The photograph, alongside Eric Clapton's drunken onstage eulogy to Enoch Powell, precipitated the formation of the Rock Against Racism movement that same year.)

One of the inbuilt problems with any David Bowie biography is how to broach the long decline that began with the mediocre Let's Dance album in 1983 and continues to this day. Trynka fares no better than Spitz in his attempts to make sense of what is, after all, the natural order of things in pop apart from a few exceptions such as Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Bowie's last notable appearance was a walk-on part in an episode of Ricky Gervais's comedy-of-cruelty sitcom, Extras, in which he played a heartless manipulator unaware of his own monumentally self-centred personality. As Trynka acidly notes, "'The Little Fat Man (With the Pug-Nosed Face)' would be the most significant new Bowie song of an entire half-decade". Perhaps, though, David Bowie, now 64, is simply ageing gracefully, having successfully reinvented himself, after his marriage to erstwhile supermodel Iman, as a family man.

Conversely, Any Day Now by Kevin Cann casts an obsessive eye over Bowie's early years and, thus, is very much a Bowie fan's dream book. Ranging from the year of his birth, 1947, until the release of Diamond Dogs in 1974, it is a diary-come-scrapbook of information and trivia. The photographs alone are extraordinary, a pictorial history of the young David Jones's dalliances with Mod subculture and hippiedom, and the renamed David Bowie's embrace of glam, gender-bending and sci-fi fantasy. Tour posters, ticket stubs, magazine covers and myriad snapshots of the fledgling star add to the general sense that this is a book for Bowie obsessives made by a Bowie obsessive. Entertaining, then, and oddly illuminating in its own completist way. A book for anoraks – if your anorak was geometric, glitter-encrusted and sequin-studded.