2001 Was Quite a Good Year Actually
2001 was a very odd year for me on a personal level. I spent most of it in a surprisingly long term relationship with a girl with whom I was not in the least bit compatible, and I was made redundant in November in the wake of the World Trade Centre attack and the dotcom crash. Jolly times.
It wasn’t bad though, funnily enough. I hated work, sure, but it was my first professional job and I was living in Cambridge which, although it’s not somewhere I’d want to settle down, was extremely pleasant. Actually, to be fair to the place, it’s not all that unlike Edinburgh in many ways – very genteel.
I also heard the album which led to me rediscovering folk music. I got into popular music largely via the Pogues, and after moving to the UK in 1993 at age seventeen I got really into both Britpop and a lot of increasingly folky stuff. That sort of petered out as I drifted more into indie over the years, and by about 1995/6 I was pretty much an out and out indie kid. When I moved to Cambridge it was on the back of Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, Moby’s Play and Doves’ brilliant debut.
In Cambridge I largely listened to The Pernice Brothers, a lot of Dylan, Eels, Radiohead, the second Clem Snide album, the first Badly Drawn Boy one, and Grandaddy. In general, whilst there are clearly some folk influences in there, it’s a pretty mainstream indie record collection. And then I heard Hem.
Rabbit Songs is an unashamed folk album, even though it sounds surprisingly poppy on re-listening. Sally Ellison’s gorgeous voice captivated me, and the re-exploration of songs like The Cuckoo brought me back into an area in which I had shown only a steadily declining interest for years. Hem themselves didn’t really carry on to fulfil the potential this album showed, but I suddenly veered back onto a folkier path, albeit one which was already being perverted by anti-folk, even though I didn’t know it yet.
From Hem – Rabbit Songs:
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I can’t really define anti-folk as a genre, and I suppose that’s probably because it started out almost more as a social movement – a rebellion against a very conservative New York folk scene – than a specific sound. Nowadays it’s too broad to be much use as a definition, but I still like the phrase I used to describe it a while back: folk music without the prettiness.
Using a definition like that Howe Gelb’s Confluence, which I bought at the same time as Rabbit Songs, is almost an anti-folk album, although I doubt he’d describe it as such. But it has a lot of the elements which, in retrospect, laid the foundations for my current love of a challenging, slightly confrotational attitude to making enjoyable music.
Basically, he didn’t always seem to be trying to make it beautiful. There are meanderings, scratches and snarls on this album the like of which I hadn’t really listened to before. I didn’t like a lot of it at the time, but I was fascinated by it. Now, I absolutely love it, but in retrospect it seems a little like Rabbit Songs nudged me off down the slope towards folk music once more and Confluence loosened one of the wheels on the wagon.
From Howe Gelb – Confluence:
Howe Gelb – Pontiac Slipstream
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Howe Gelb – Can’t Help Falling in Love
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every year is a good year….Gold by Ryan Adams came out in 2001.
Anti-folk….what a stupid fucking term if i’ve ever heard one
i think i might have had too much coffee today…..
I like that Hem record too, but in 2001 I was going through a “progressive hip-hop” phase, so I was heavily into The Avalanches, Prefuse 73, Amon Tobin, To Rococo Rot, Squarepusher, Machine Drum, etc. I hardly listened to indie or indie-folk at all at the time, which means that it was 2003 before I got properly into the great 2001 releases like Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator), the Blue Trees EP by Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, No More Shall We Part by Nick Cave (which I didn’t hear until 2008 but which may now be my favorite record of the decade). Ah, reminiscing. Fucking 9-11 spoiled music for me for months afterwards. I hardly listened to anything until 2002.
how do you mean 9-11 spoilt music?
It was either ’01 or ’02 that I saw Hem perform in a smoky lil bar with Beth Orton. As much as I liked Hem’s Rabbit Songs, I adore their last album Funnel Cloud.
how do you mean 9-11 spoilt music?
There was an awful lot of awful rubbish written in its immediate aftermath. And I guess if you happened to be American then you might not have been in the best frame of mind to enjoy things you might normally.
Muruch – I’m surprised. I have been unable to prevent myself from buying every one of their albums, but unfortunately I just can’t get over the first ones. The rest have seemed just a little like squishy alt-country-lite if I’m being brutally honest.
Well, it didn’t spoil music, it just spoiled it for me. I was jumpy for a while, and I had a hard time enjoying anything that seemed at all “trivial.” It wore off though.
how do you mean 9-11 spoilt music?
I was living and playing music 35 miles outside of Manhattan at the time. People stopped going out and gigs certainly dried up in the area.
2001 opened my eyes and ears to Ben Harper and Ozomatli, plus the Spice Girls disbanded putting a nail in the boy/girl band era coffin.
I listened to nothing after 9-11.
For a few to six months at least I listened to nothing at all. We were shocked beyond recognition, at my house, having just moved away from that place, having just quit working in the building next door. The only sound we listened to was CNN news 24/7 (not recommended, it just was our reaction of disbelief). I remember thinking to myself, “no one will make music anymore.” It seems trite and overdramatic all at the same time to me now but it was the feeling at the time. We didn’t hear an airplane for almost a week if you can imagine that. And the sound of the first plane overhead sent me running inside, tears streaming down my face in a total panic. It took a long time for music and truthfully, Neil Young ruined so much of it for me.
But I came around again and it was to folk music and to labor/folk music as we marched against war and against xenophobia and all sorts of fear. So, like in my youth, it was Billy Bragg and Woody Guthrie and Utah Phillips who brought me back.
Well, this thread has grown dark! Sorry luvs xoxox
i don’t know what to say…..other that i (with my girlfriend) was in New York a couple of weeks ago and we went down to he WTC and it’s a big bloody space that has been left…and i don’t mean this in any flippant way.
One recurring thought that keeps coming back to me from that day is this…on 9-11 i was living in Leeds and my girlfriend’s mother was visiting and all this shite kicked off and i want to watch whatever news was on to understand what was going on….anyway, all my girlfriend’s (a different one to the one i went to NYC with) mother wanted to do was watch Eastenders (an English soap) and screamed at her….do you not understand thousands of people have died today! she just looked at me blankly and went but i want to watch…..i stormed out the room…..
dunno where this came from but i’ve been thinking about it since coming back from NYC.
the term ‘anti-folk’ is more important nowadays than ever before. lazy jouranlists will label any music folk so long as there’s an acoustic guitar within a 100yrd radius of the studio it was recorded in. and to be honest, 90% of what gets tagged as folk these days i wouldn’t touch with a shitty stick. it’s a nice catch all term in my opinion, it’s very clear and descriptive unlike more abstract examples (‘punk” being the worst offender…what the fuck is punk?).
rant over.
sorry.
x
I don’t really understand the American reaction to the Twin Towers thing. I mean, I try and sympathise because a lot of people take it very seriously and it was very shocking, but it killed no more Americans than the IRA killed Britons, and the IRA were often given safe harbour in America.
So yes, the shock was considerable because it was all at once, but how long it lasted is a bit of a mystery. Yes, it was a terrorist attack, yes it was spectacular, but… no, sorry. Don’t quite understand it.
This is going to spark a discussion I really don’t want to have, I suppose, but given how many Iraqis have died for someone’s vanity project and political misdirection, I think anyone who wasn’t directly affected (ie lived in the city or lost relatives) really has to… well, there’s a million ways I could put this, all of them mean, but I suppose you get my point by now.
“lazy jouranlists will label any music folk so long as there’s an acoustic guitar within a 100yrd radius of the studio”
“I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar, it meant that you were a protest singer.”
“[9/11] killed no more Americans than the IRA killed Britons, and the IRA were often given safe harbour in America.
Have never understood why sections of the US seemed to feel that it was OK to support the IRA. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t happy with the behaviour of the Brtish Army over many things in Northern Ireland, but killing civilians is not acceptable. Far too many of those people who supported organisations like NORAID had never even been to Northern Ireland. By the mid-seventies, neither the paramilitary organisations on either side nor the British Army held the moral highground.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot emerged through the mist of 9/11 and it’s the most important album I own. And the lyrics of Jesus etc are quite creepy given when the album arrived:
“tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad sad songs”.
As for the WTC site. I believe Daniel Libeskind won a design competition to redevelop the site. His vision (if you don’t know who he is, he also designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin)was excellent. However, the landowner decided that he wanted his own architects and wanted to maximise profits i.e. build as many tall buildings on the site as possible. Not sure what the position is now but I’m sure that at the time I was doing my thesis, one of the design briefs was that you could not build upon the footprints of the towers. Also, many people don’t believe the site should be built upon at all, as it is a massive graveyard for the hundreds of people who were never found. I guess its been untouched so far as it can take years to redevelop land – add in the emotive edge of this site and it could take many more years yet.
Well is that the only really good 9/11 album? I know I thought Bruce Springsteen one was dreadful, but I absolutely fucking love Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
god i talk shite when i’m drunk
what other 9/11 albums were there?
Ach, I don’t know. And I don’t care really – it’s a discussion we can all live without having, I think. I’ll write the Friday Fives and we can all forget about it and move on.
yeah…..last night was awesome…..
I typed a really long comment earlier in here all about my experiences visiting New York the following June.
I just couldn’t get it right, so I deleted the whole lot.
I’ll just pipe in to say that I largely agree with Matthew about the American reaction to 9-11. Obviously it was a horrible thing, and it hit us particularly hard only because we had put ourselves in some kind of bubble, thinking that we were immune to that kind of violence. But the fact is we just totally panicked, and over the last 8 years we allowed our fear and anger to take us pretty fucking far down the road of becoming the monsters that Al Qaeda accused us of being. Hopefully we can set things right in the future and start acting like grown-ups.
Well, not grown-ups perhaps. Instead, let’s say “non-assholes.”
Now, on to the Friday fives.
Well said, C&B.
Lifted by bright eyes was heavily affected by 9/11, and that’s a great album.
Also 9/11′s most tangeable aftershock was what it did to Paul McCartney
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzWrIX4xEi4&feature=related
Probably a worse atrocity.
thats fucking nasty