Music Monday

Inspired by much Twittering, and because on Monday mornings I need a musical kick in the arse:

Late night musical interlude

It's 1 am in the morning and I'm buying a Violent Femmes album off iTunes. Not sure why really, beyond it being a bloody brilliant album obviously.

Violent Femmes-Add It Up (live)

Finnish people in cool weather

Not that bloggers would ever be obsessive weirdos with excessive numbers of bees in their bonnets about completely unimportant things and a constant need to share those with innocent bystanders, but I feel I have to revisit the issue of Finns and the weather. This morning when I noticed the temperature was 10 oC when I was about to leave home on my bike I decided to wear shorts. With these, a cycle shirt and a long sleeve cycle jersey over it, I was fine - indeed a bit sweaty. I should have worn fingerless cycling gloves rather than full gloves for instance. Anyways - down in the city, near Pasila station, a ninja on a bike rode past me. I mean I presume the chap must have been a ninja because along with the black shell suit he was also wearing a black balaclava pulled up over his nose, so only the eyes were showing (if anyone hears that a bank got robbed this morning in the Pasila area by a dude on the bike, I will of course retract this and pass on the information to the authorities...).

Now I well accept that there are real difference in how much people feel the cold, but can there be that big a differences?! I was out this evening in the yard in a t-shirt standing around doing nothing beyond trying to break up the occasional toddler war, whilst the neighbour who was very busily pushing the lawn mower was wearing full goretex, a woolly cap, and gloves!?

Finns have all sorts of strange genetic conditions and diseases, indeed my friend was telling us just yesterday about her just completed PhD research into one such genetic condition, but a predisposition to feeling the cold seems an odd evolution for a Nordic nation! I blame nurture not nature, and think the modern world is sucking the sisu away from my Finnish friends. I worry for the future of the nation, I really do.

And yep, the title was an oblique reference to a certain song, but you probably have to be at least in your 30s and British to get it. I was expecting to find the song on YouTube and embed it here but surprisingly, couldn't find it. So instead, for no other reason than that it is still a kick-arse tune, is Mark E. Smith with the Inspiral Carpets doing "I want you".

It shouldn't be funny...

...what with it being a story of people peeing on each other and alleged if unproven claims of underage sex, but Slate's coverage of the R. Kelly trial really, really is. What I remember of R. Kelly's music I remember as being lousy, and I have zero interest in his career, but with writing this good, that doesn't really matter.

Straight Edge

I was listening to yesterday's Broadcasting House as I was cycling home through the drizzle tonight and they had a piece on Straight Edge making a comeback in London. The guy they interviewed was 19, he seemed a very nice lad and being straight edge had obviously helped him sort out his problems, but being 19 I don't think he had much historical perspective on the movement and came up with delightful line of "it started on the American west coast in cities like Boston and Florida." Ahhh! Bless his little clean-livin' socks but someone get him an atlas for Christmas.

It did make think of the Fugazi though for the first time in years.



Interestingly if you look up Fugazi on YouTube all the comments seem to be about whether Fugazi were emo or not (including even in Spanish in the clip above!?). The answer is so obviously, NOT! Emo is, in my humble opinion, the bastard child of late 80s Goth and New Romantics. Fugazi very clearly wasn't either.

Flying business class to the sixth form disco

A few years back I had a cool job working for the UN Environment Programme. The pay was pretty crap and the work was hard, but I guess you are expected to do it for the love of the environment or some such. As an "adviser" to the unit chairman (i.e. dogsbody) I had do everything from -literally- the photocopying, to meeting a Prime Minister, albeit of a very small and unimportant country. But the thing that made up for that, at least for me, was that traveling a lot at very short notice we had to fly business class. I had never flown business before and I never went any further than Pristina, so never got to go on one of the big plane where the chair turns into a bed and you get a personal DVD player and all that cool stuff. But you did get more chance to stretch, take more stuff on as hand luggage, nicer food, wine and get on and off quicker. You still get to the same place, but the overall experience is nicer.

So I caved into the peer group and marketing pressure and bought an iPod. It is very pretty and particularly as I already have a MacBook, it all colour coordinates nicely - which as we all know, is one of the most important functions to look for in an MP3 player. But I'm starting to get Mac's genius. You take it out of the box, plug it into your computer and all these things start to happen. Smooth things. White things. Things with rounded contours. Things that don't go "ping" but click in quiet and comforting ways. Messages are short and to the point and don't use words like "drivers", "program files", "installation error". Instead it gently suggests how it could be useful to you. And within ten minutes of plugging it in, I'm unplugging it and ready to listen to 1.7 days of music and podcasts. If only life could all be so simple. So more expensive than the alternative options that will still play your music and podcasts, but the overall experience is nicer.

I immediately went to the "my favourites" playlist and proceeded to dance round the kitchen as I did the washing up, like a beer-ed up 18 year old at the sixth form disco.

And if anyone wants to compare playlists - of my CDs that I have so far ripped to iTunes (not actually that many due to having a small MP3 player before) this is the "my favourites" list. Make of it what you will!

• The Eton Rifles 3:59 The Jam The Sound Of The Jam Rock
• Tomorrow 3:43 James The Best Of James Alternative & Punk
• The Road Is Not Your Only Friend 2:38 Jeff Lang Whatever Makes You Happy Blues
• Sometimes 5:19 My Bloody Valentine Lost In Translation Soundtrack
• Can't Stop 4:31 Red Hot Chili Peppers By The Way Rock
• North Country Boy 4:02 Charlatans Melting Pot Alternative & Punk
• Hoobaale 5:05 K'naan The Dusty Foot Philosopher Hip Hop/Rap
• Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill 4:17 Lauryn Hill The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill R&B

To iPod or not to iPod?

If one technological device has changed my life over the last couple of years - it's the Creative Zen Nano Plus MP3 player pictured above. After buying a very cheap no-brand MP3 player two and half years ago to 'see what it does', I discovered podcasting - one of those words you were aware of previously but hadn't taken much account of - a bit like "email" was to me until mid-1995. That first MP3 player would continually turn itself off due to static, so carrying it outside on cold winters day in nylon jacket was pretty hopeless, yet I was hooked on the content so upgraded to the Nano Plus. In the two years since I bought it various radio stations around the world, plus other sources such as newspapers and magazines, have increased the availability of quality podcasts. One of the first things I really missed when I first came to Finland in the mid-90s was having access to all the media I wanted. I was reliant on very crackly World Service shortwave broadcasts and the local Finnish YLE station that rebroadcast international radio services on FM, but not always in English. But with podcasting now I can listen to as much BBC as I have time for, and now not just the World Service - although it still remains my favourite - but also the domestic broadcasters like Radio 4 and FiveLive. It makes a huge difference for me in the 'expat experience' - making my new home and old home feel not very far apart. When I arrive in the UK I really feel that I have missed very little, perhaps the odd TV-celebrity but I can easily live without that part of the zeitgeist. Add to this, I'm now more of 'global citizen' listening to a lot of U.S. radio and bits and bobs from other odd corners of the planet.

But after two years of everyday use, of being stuffed in pockets and dropped repeatedly on the ground - including from a fast moving bicycle on a number of occasions - the buttons on the Nano are giving up the ghost. Sometimes you buy things that disappoint but I can say without reservation that Creative engineered a little piece of perfection in the Nano Plus. Of course with consumer culture being what it is, Creative has since dropped this gem from their range. So I have tried the new Creative Stone Plus that seems to be the replacement but was so disappointed that after about three weeks returned it to the shop and got my money back. It was really unstable - whenever you connected it to the USB cable (which is how it recharges) it would loose it place in the track you were listening to. This maybe isn't a problem when listening to three minute pop ditties on shuffle, but bloody annoying when half way through a 50 minute panel discussion on say, the role of conservative Christians in the Republican primary race! The delete didn't work well either leaving ghost tracks on the MP3 player which it would try to play, and requiring regular reformatting to clean it up.

I've seen something like the Nano Plus, just a slightly bigger and older version being flogged off for EUR 4o in the local supermarket. But then I'm also tempted by the 4GB iPod Nano but that is also four times the price at EUR 160. My MacBook has been a great success since one friend persuaded me to make the jump to Apple, but do I need an iPod? What makes them so great? They don't even have a built in microphone which is a superb feature in my Nano that I now use for every interview I do for work, allowing me to have all the interviews as MP3 files on various computers. Oh - decisions, decisions...

Help me out dear readers. Any iPod owners please tell me if its is good or not. Are their any other Mac users out there who have a good non-iPod MP3 player that they love? I've had a look at some Sony and Philips and Creative ones but most seem to only have software that needs Windows...

It is perhaps a reflection that we have charmed lives in the first world that we get to worry about such things, but there you go. I am embracing the pointlessly consumerist and rapaciously capitalist side to my existence and really getting some angst going over this. Help me out please!

Non-voting foreigners for Obama

For tonight I'm suspending my normal cynicism.

Super Tuesday is here. Hoo Har.

American culture, or at least popular culture, has a tendency towards melodrama and schmaltz as a million Hollywood movie-endings attest. But when they do schmaltz they can really do wonderful, stirring, touching, goose-bump inducing schmaltz.



Every country should have an Obama. There should be a law on it.

Sympathy for the Devil

The regime in Iran is a thoroughly repressive, autocratic, illiberal AND incompetent bunch - haven't the people of Iran suffered enough? Maybe not. From the BBC:

De Burgh 'will play gig in Iran'

Lady In Red star Chris De Burgh will be the first Western artist to play a concert in Iran since the country's 1979 revolution, according to reports.

The poor Iranians wait nearly 30 years for someone to come and play some gigs and then we send Chris De Burgh?! It must be some complicated CIA pys-ops mission I presume. Oh well, if nothing else it is an excuse to link this again.

On serial killers and hypocrisy

I quite like watching Dexter, the series about the serial-killing-police-technician. It’s not on a level with great shows like the Wire, the Sopranos or Deadwood, all the cop characters are straight out of the ‘dummies guide to American TV cop clichés’, but it passes an hour in the evening when you want your brain to rest. So I sat down on Thursday night to watch it, only to find it had been pulled from the schedule and replaced with nature documentary. Clearly the management of Finland’s Nelonen TV channel thought that showing a series about a serial killer the day after a school massacre was in bad taste. But isn’t serial killing as entertainment always in bad taste? Last week’s edition of the superb This American Life was called “How to Rest in Peace”, and listening to it the day after the shooting in Jokela and just before sitting down, in vain as it was to turn out, to watch Dexter was one of those slightly spooky coincidences. This American Life interviewed a number of people who had had close family members murdered. The first woman whose father had been killed and the murderer never found, said that most normal people don’t realise what a huge amount of popular culture is based around murdering people. Not just television shows and movies, but books and even games like Cluedo. She pointed out that people even go to murder-mystery dinners where someone gets killed and then all the participants have to detect ‘whodunnit’. She fairly points out that we wouldn’t go to a rape-mystery dinner where the evening’s entertainment is sleuthing-out who the rapist is. That would be sick. So why is murder OK?

So, back to my missing episode of Dexter. If it was OK for me to watch a witty and righteous serial killer set against Miami’s pastel shades and beautiful people last week, why not this week? Pekka-Eric listed lots of films and music he liked, but no TV programmes. So no one is trying to blame Dexter for seven dead innocent Finns, indeed Auvinen even helpfully wrote in his ‘manifesto’: “Don’t blame the movies I see, the music I hear, the games I play or the books I read. No, they had nothing to do with this.” It would be nice, like after Columbine, to again blame Marilyn Manson because - quite frankly - his music is shit and his dress sense ridiculous. Getting kids to dress as Goths should be illegal, but it’s not and his lyrics about killing and suffering and death did not put a gun in Auvinen’s hand.

I watched another TV show on friday, Law and Order, that makes entertainment out of rape AND murder. The amusing thing is that one of the lead cops, ever ready to dish out justice to street punks, is played by Ice-T. One needs to be of a certain age and musical inclination to remember that Ice-T was once public enemy no.1. After his band Body Count released Cop-Killer, he was more of a public enemy than Public Enemy – that’s clearly pretty bad; or cool depending on your perspective. If I remember right the President Bush at the time denounced the song, and gansta rap generally, as a threat to national security. And now Ice-T is in Law and Order, the same show that Fred Thompson – running in the republican primaries for the presidential nomination for 2008 – also appears. Postmodern or just the American Dream?

So this brings me, from laughing along with serial killers, via rapping about killing cops, finally to rhyming couplets about chopping off heads. Amina Malik – who wanted to be known as the ‘Lyrical Terrorist’ – was found guilty in London this week of “possessing records [and I don’t think they meant Ice-T LPs] likely to be used for terrorism”. All the media has gone big on the poetry which included ditties such as: "Let us make Jihad/ Move to the front line/ To chop chop head of kuffar swine". Nice. But, thank God, we’re not yet imprisoning people for bad poetry. Yet. She was found innocent of charges of possessing an article for terrorism purposes, but found guilty of a lesser charge of having articles that could be useful for terrorism purposes. The law seems horribly illiberal, as surely many people will have some articles that could be useful for terrorism somewhere. I hate to think what the Met would be able to charge me with if they went through my office bookshelves and lever-arch files. Luckily my office does not come under UK law, but I haven’t heard of them raiding the offices of university department, think-tanks, and research institutes in London where my fellow terrorism researchers do their work, to seize their files. So rather it seems that Malik’s bad poetry and professed love for the Mujahideen is what made it a bad thing for her to possess such written material, there being no suggestion that she was actually planning violence or knew anyone who was. That sounds like a thought crime. It might be amusing if the police raided the houses of every far-right activist known to them to see if they have copies of the Turner Diaries next to Mein Kampf on their bookshelves, then arrest them. But it would also be illiberal and immoral. If the Malik case does suggest one thing, that is that Britain has sensible gun control laws. She possibly is or was crazy enough to kill people had she had the opportunity. But unlike Finland where it is easier to get a gun license than a driver's license, and unlike Pekka-Eric Auvinen, she didn’t get a gun and instead kept writing bad poetry on the back of till receipts. So we act shocked, tut at news, think what a terrible person she is and what an awful person he must have been, then flip the channel and settle down to enjoy and hour of being entertained by a serial killing.

Musical nationalism

I was half listening to the Finnish news in English this morning at 7.30 am on YLE - i.e. still half asleep - and thought that I had heard them say that newest single from top-Finnish-soft-rockers HIM, had gone straight into the British charts at no.1, knocking off another Finnish song, from crap-goth-opera-rockers Nightwish, from the top spot. I wasn't quite sure why this was headline news in comparison to, say, the ongoing who-the-hell-is-in-charge-of-Finnish-foreign-policy-? debate, but there you go - cultural exports and all that.

So I was surprised to see the headline in Helsingin Sanomat this afternoon:

HIM single fails to make it into British Top 40 on release

This seems even more unimportant news than actually getting to number 1 in the 'hit parade'. Hesari does note though at the bottom of the piece that:

On the more specified UK Top 40 Rock Singles Chart, on the other hand, HIM made it to #1. The band took over the top position from another Finnish group, Nightwish, whose Amaranth single now slips down to number two.

So actually the news on the radio this morning was that HIM had made it to the top of the UK "Rock" chart. I didn't even know that the UK had a rock chart!? I guess someone has to count what the losers in overly tight jeans, bullet belts and immensely bad hair fashion spend their money on, but really YLE - you are meant to be the national broadcaster. Please! Reporting on how 'your lads' are doing in the UK rock chart seems to be scraping the bottom of the petty nationalistic pride barrel.

It did make me wonder why the Finnish media is obsessed with how well the Finnish bands do (or don't do) in the UK charts as opposed to, say, the German top 40?

Could it be because the UK has given the world The Beatles; The Rolling Stones; The Sex Pistols; The Smiths; New Order; The Stone Roses; Teenage Fanclub (ok - I snuck that one in on a more personal note); Radiohead; Oasis; etc. Whilst Germany has given the world, ummmm.... The Scorpions.

Road to Zion

Jody (back in autumnal black-powerstretch-ninja-mode) does the second ascent of "Road to Zion" (VS 4c/5a).

I haven't done a climbing post for ages, so here's one. I climbed a new route yesterday at Haukkakallio. I had tried to climb it onsight last weekend, but it had been too dirty and the crack that the route follows too choked with mud, so I cleaned it on abseil but didn't have time to try leading it, hence I was dead keen to return to this weekend. The actual climbing went well, it was hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that I couldn't do it.

Anni through the quickdraws on "The Constant Gardener" (HS 4b).

For any non-climbers reading: once you have done a first ascent, you can name the climb - so I had to think of a name. I'm off to Israel in a few days, so I thought that something Biblical would be good - in future years it will help me remember when I did the climb. There are many, many climbs in the UK of a certain age - normally from the 1950s and earlier - that have biblical or classically inspired names. They point to both a higher level of church going, and of a more classical education of those times. I'm rather embarrassed that when I did routes like Agag's Groove in Glencoe, or Via Dolorosa at the Roaches, that I didn't even get the Biblical references in their names. If you are a mid-grade climber (most routes of that grade had been done by the 1960s) in Britain and you actually check on Wikipedia where the name of the climbs you have done, come from it will teach you many things that perhaps we should have learned in Sunday School or English literature lessons.

Jody storming the "Battlements" (VS 4c). English Tony looks on.

So I was trying to think of a good Israel-connected name; I like the word Zion, very classical - lots of poetic and literary resonance, but alone it seemed a bit to short. The phrase "Road to Zion" came to mind, although I couldn't remember why - maybe because it sounded like the movie "Road to Perdition" which I enjoyed. So when I got home I googled the phrase and the first thing that comes up is the Damian Marley song of the same name, which must be the reason the phrase was first in my head. As Damian's father, Bob, wrote the most famous song ever about climbing cracks (we're jammin', we're jammin', we hope you like jammin' too... of course its about climbing!) this was a good start, but when I saw that "Road to Zion" is from an album called called - wait for it - "Welcome to Jamrock" I had found the perfect name.

The song is 'politically conscious', as it is called in the genre, as well - attacking Mugabe. Zimbabwe has been on my mind recently. Mugabe might be evil, but I've never heard him called stupid - yet even with just an A-level in economics, I can tell he simply doesn't get supply and demand - hence an economy running at nearly 10,000% inflation. So dissing Mugabe just makes the song better. Check it out below.

Flight of the Conchord - New Zealand absurd

Perhaps I'm behind the times but I hadn't head of the Flight of the Conchords before. I've just listened to them being interviewed on NPR and kept laughing out loud so thought I should blog it for anyone else who needs a laugh. You'll never mix up getting invited to a spit roast and a barbecue again.

If you like that, here's more:

"Praise the Lord and pass the Ammunition"

A week without blogging. Sorry. I'm rubbish, but I am still here. Time just flies when you are stressed, tired and not having much fun. Anyway, enough of my moaning.

Over the last couple of years I've become a huge fan of Andy Kershaw's Radio 3 show. Perhaps I'm growing up if the one music show I listen to weekly is on Radio 3 - and quite clearly Tuareg desert music and acoustic English folk should be what all the cool kids are listening to, even if they aren't. Anyway over the last couple of weeks he has being playing tracks off a CD called: "Kickin' Hitler's Butt: Vintage Anti-Fascists Songs 1940-1944". What a collection. This weeks track was "Praise The Lord & Pass The Ammunition" by The Southern Sons Quartet. All wonderfully odd. Basically this reminded me of the photo above that I found some time ago and have been waiting for a good opportunity to share. Today seems as good a time as any as the Southern Sons Quartet show a good historical legacy to mixing American exceptionalism, blatant militarism and God. All good clean fun.

DJ Besho

So the FT isn' t the most likely place to find tips for cutting edge hip hop, but I just read an article in their weekend magazine on DJ Besho, Afghanistan's preeminent MC. As ever, he's already on YouTube:



I think the song is called "Shoma Afghanistan" ("You're an Afghan") and if you listen carefully you can hear him name check all the provinces of the country. According to the FT it's a song about peace and an end to fighting between Afghan brothers. He's got the Hummer in the video - of course - (actually - there are Hummer's in Afghanistan that aren't full of US squaddies?!) but no women. As Besho told the FT: "In Kunduz there were more than 1,000 people in the audience but no women. This is a problem for Afghanistan". I don't think he means just at hip hop concerts.

Nevertheless there is something quite heartwarming about, pro-peace Pashtun hip-hop.

In your best Westwood accent: No doubt, no doubt. Maximum respect to DJ Besho. Peace, out.

The politics of Eurovision

I can't believe I'm writing this, I'm sorry - I really am. Anyway, Eurovision and Israel, here we go...

So after putting up Teapack via YouTube yesterday I noticed someone had come to this blog after doing a blogsearch for them. I followed the link to see who else had blogged about the song and near the top was Little Green Footballs. Wanting to test my theory that generally one of Little Green Footballs' more moronic commenters will suggest nuking Mecca within the first ten comments on any post, (I'm slightly disappointed that they didn't this time - the level of bile being spouted on LGF can't be moderating can it? They are laughing about Palestinians shooting themselves by about comment 12, although I have to admit there is some dark comedy value in anyone shooting themselves) I followed the link. Anyway, according to LGF, one comment made by some Eurovision bod that the song is too political and won't be allowed is yet more damning evidence of European antisemitism, the collapse of Western civilization, the arrival of the rapacious barbarian hordes at the gates of Vienna- you know, the normal kind of stuff.

There are two things to point out about this, firstly - according to the Jerusalem Post - it's not true: the Israeli TV channel have checked the rules and with the competition organizers and they have nothing against the song. And secondly, even if the song was seen as being too political there is nothing anti-Israeli about that as it has happened in the past to other countries. The last case being that of the Ukrainian entry, Razom Nas Bahato, Nas Ne Podolaty, in 2005 by the rap outfit GreenJolly. GreenJolly were propelled to fame by the Orange Revolution of 2004 as the above mentioned song became the anthem of the protesters, including the snappy refrain:

No to lies!
Yushchenko - Yes! Yushchenko - Yes!
This is our President.
Yes! Yes!

Or in the original Ukrainian if you prefer:

Ні брехні!
Ющенко - Так, Ющенко - Так!
Це наш президент!
Так! Так!

When they tried to enter this song as the Ukrainian Eurovision entry for that year's competition in Kiev, it was deemed too political. GreenJolly, obviously not wanting to miss out on their moment of Euro-fame, re-worded the song to be a general celebration of revolution and not telling fibs, rather than specific ode to President Yushchenko. The 2005 competition was held in Kiev after Ruslana of Ukraine won in 2004. I tell you this only as a rather lame reason to add a picture of the lovely Ruslana in her cave-girl outfit (see right) to this post. Sadly, GreenJolly came a rather poor 20th, gaining only 30 points, suggesting that we Europeans prefer cute cave-girls to vaguely political Slavic hip-hop. It's a language thing I'm sure. The competition that year was won by the also unfeasibly attractive Elena Paparizou of Greece (but you'll have to google her yourself chaps if you want eye-candy).

The Guardian arts section(oh, the irony!) in 2005 had a brief discussion on the GreenJolly incident, along with many other Eurovision oddities and trivia; read it here. The article mentions the gently anti-American sentiment to the Russian entry that year and that Norway once entered a song about hydro-electric power - can this really be true? Knowing Eurovision - probably, and it's almost certainly on Wikipedia, which seems very strong on Eurovision! If anyone can be bothered to look it up, I'll blog it. Promise.

Toby's Eurovision-politics trivia contribution: Lulu's "Boom Bang A Bang" (joint first place 1969), was deemed unsuitable for airplay by the BBC during the 1991 Gulf War. If I remember correctly though, they forgot to put The Cure's "killing an Arab" on the list. Doh.

Toby's rather pitiful Eurovision claim to fame: I've met one of this year's presenters, Jaana Pelkonen, at a mate's party. She seemed very nice and is just as pretty as she looks on the telly, but she is very very small. Pocket sized really. I hope her co-presenter isn't too tall, or older British viewer at least might be reminded of the immortal 1989 Brit awards, with Sam Fox and and that tall bloke from Fleetwood Mac - the worst awards ceremony ever?

Israel for Eurovision 2007?

Yeah! Push that button. If Lordi can win it, why not? Although they aren't as attractive as the Croatian woman last year who garnered much more attention for her leaked Paris Hilton-style video than for her singing...

You've gotta love Eurovision, and it's even in my hometown this year!

Thanks to Charly for the link - he's obviously a big Eurovision fan...

"Beautiful ladies in emergency situations"

Today I have been mostly reading about the Algerian civil war. This is, unsurprisingly, horribly miserable. But fortunately whilst searching through my browser's bookmarks for something depressing and dull that I need to check, I happened upon the bookmark for Bill Bailey's website which I discovered months ago and subsequently forgot about. "Beautiful ladies in emergency situations", a song not quite by Chris de Burgh, is a work of pure comedic genius and will make even the most depressed smile. More audio clips here.

Heavyweights of hip-hop

I keep seeing these adverts on the telly for "the Heavyweights of Hip Hop" coming to Finland. And who are these heavyweights? Snoop Dog and P. Diddy. Lets get one thing straight, neither of these are heavyweights of anything besides marketing. Snoop Dog has always been the pantomime dame of hip hop with rhymes as blunt as his, well, blunts. Peepee Diddlydee is just a marketing degree case-study demonstrating that lots of people are really stupid and will buy all sorts of shit if you flog it hard enough. He went to private school and got - unsurprisingly - a business degree from a good university. How 'street' is that? The guy is bright and a grinder, no doubt, but his music is just crap that fits well a particular niche. It's depressing that kids paying some huge amount of money to go and watch them at the Hartwall Arena may actually think these chancers are Hip Hop Heavyweights. They aren't.

For those who need the education, this is heavyweight hip hop:

And even the coolest shorties know it:

"If you've got a website, I wanna be on it..."

My pleasure Billy. Here you go:



As the show host says, a national treasure.

I always feel a bit bad about seeing something interesting or fun on another blog, and then pinching it and putting it on mine. But that's the blogosphere and I guess if you, dear readers, haven't happened to have visited the original blog you wouldn't have seen it anyway so I'm sort of helping out. Therefore credit for this goes to Harry's Place who had a Billy Bragg themed post. The other YouTube clip on that post, of Billy doing "Unisex Chip Shop" with Bill Bailey at Glastonbury, is also well worth two minutes of most peoples time.