Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

The Wu is back! That’s right: living legends of hip-hop The Wu-Tang Clan are back on tour. Featuring an 11 strong posse including main players RZA, GZA, Raekwon and Ghostface Killa this could be the last chance to see them all on the same stage.

Their debut Enter the Wu-Tang(36 chambers) along with their fantastic solo work(Liquid Swords, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… and Supreme Clientel to name but a few) are ranked as some of the best albums in hip-hop. The UK shows take place at the Manchester Academy on the 3rd of August and the Brixton Academy on August the 4th. Tickets on sale now!

That is the daunting question being asked by Dutch composer Michel van der Aa in his latest opera, After Life, which has its UK premiere at the Barbican on 15th May.

Based on the 1998 film of the same name, the opera’s characters are at a midpoint between heaven and earth. Before they leave their earthly lives behind, they are allowed to relive only one key moment in their life, which they can then take with them to eternity in the form of a film.

Every week, a new group of dead people enter this midpoint between heaven and earth, and have to sift through their memories to choose one, decisive moment.

“It such a humanistic story,” says van der Aa. “Something that we all can relate to. Everybody has one or several moments that they like to think about – but I haven’t picked one yet.”

For the University of London students we surveyed, decisive moments were mostly orientated – perhaps unsurprisingly – around family and friendship. Answers included:

Euro-trip last summer, watching fireworks with my family on New Year’s Eve, getting a coursework question in last week’s exam, first day at university, family vacation to Alaska, my first graduation, and – for one enamored student – valentine’s day.

To help the audience answer this philosophical question, van der Aa hopes to awaken their imagination by combining live stage action with film, music and an electro-acoustic sound. A series of mini-films have been recorded by the cast and will be projected onto the stage while the opera unfolds. “It’s a very natural extension to my music and a very natural extension to my vocabulary – stretching my vocabulary in a way I could cope with more ideas,” van der Aa added.

Since its world premiere in 2006, Van der Aa has developed and perfected the composition of After Life: “Back then I decided I wanted to compose a very sparse musical material because there are so many things happening on stage, but I think in being that careful the music turned out to be a little too sparse. So this is one of the things I immediately thought I had a chance to change.”

The UK premiere of After Life at the Barbican is performed by ASKO/Schoenberg Ensemble conducted by Otto Tausk, who also premiered the work in 2006.

More details on the website: http://www.barbican.org.uk/afterlife/

The first queercore record I ever heard – I guess this was in about 2002 – was a Xerox-covered 45 by Limp Wrist. I was a big hardcore fan back then – fifteen, angry with the usual stuff – and any money I had I spent on records. As long as it was loud, snotty and pissed off, as long as it had the sort of sleeve that rubbed ink off on fingers and thumbs, it was good enough for me. I used to pick them up at gigs: merch stalls worth their salt always had a “distro” point, looked after – curated, even – by some local scene vet. This distro was rarely more than a battered box of sevens, maybe the odd CD, badges, patches, zines: some of it British, yeah, but also American, Mexican, French, Italian. These distros trafficked the good stuff, they were the silk routes and merchant ports of a DIY underground that linked Portland and Brighton, Barcelona and Minsk, or at least that’s how it felt. The Limp Wrist single – self-titled, photo of an X-ed, straight-edge fist on the front – was a typical distro find, the normal three or four quid and a bunch of flyers tucked inside.

I’d kind of assumed it was a “queer” record, with a band called something like that, and it was. That’s probably why I bought it: not gay myself, but gay seemed interesting, gay punks more so, militant gay Latino punks something else entirely. “Gay” at this point to me still mostly meant Elton John and George Michael, News of the World exposés, this club in Brighton called Revenge with a snaking queue on Friday nights, cheap playground libels. Limp Wrist were a punch in the teeth. They confronted me about sexuality in a way that I’d never experienced before. Their lyrics were about cruising for guys, fucking guys, fucking guys plural, and men in Texas and the Middle East getting murdered for the same; and this as much as they were about fighting, or being edge, or hating the government, and all the other things hardcore bands normally bellowed about.

Most of all, they rejected the gay mainstream – the “rainbow machine” as one song put it – and embraced a version of queer that was united, subversive, comfortably ugly, a version of queer that was, in short, punk. Screw the “Abercrombie gays”, the pretty boy beefcakes, frontman Martin Sorrondeguy screamed on ‘Punk Ass Queers’: “bring on the drag kings, their big fake dicks/and I’ll hang with hustlers, leather boys and punks/coz I’m not down with normal world junk”. Yeah, Limp Wrist were gay and – as they made it clear in song after song – here to stay. So deal with it, world, or fuck off.

As I soon found out, other bands had said or were saying similar things, not always in the same way, not always so angrily, but certainly with the same defiance: Team Dresch, Gravy Train!!!!, Gayrilla Biscuits, Assacre, Gay For Johnny Depp, and loads more. In 2010, the scene remains alive and well, with upstart Bristol label Local Kid doing mean things over here whilst old U.S. stalwarts Chainsaw and Kill Rock Stars remain as committed as ever. Get Limp Wrist’sDiscography first though and you’ll see how they – and queercore in general – woke me up to some things, made me understand being and living “queer” as much as anyone who isn’t or doesn’t could ever hope to. Because queercore isn’t a ghetto: it’s for all of us.