Things A Little Bird Didn't Tell Me

Earlier this week I saw a couple of news stories that struck me as the kind of thing I might have tweeted about, if I had a Twitter account I actually used. Now that Twitter's fluttering like a sparrow with a broken wing, I'm finally starting to wonder if it mightn't have been worth joining in with the fun, back when there supposedly was some. Too late now, as Wet Leg would say.

And since I've mentioned Wet Leg, entirely uncoincidentally by the way, we may as well begin with them. I warn you, though, it's sad news. So sad, in fact, that I've already rejected several half-decent humorous quips and asides that popped into my mind unbidden. If you're the kind of person that needs to get a laugh out of someone else's tragedy you can jolly well make up your own jokes for once.

I'll quote the NME headline verbatim because it sums the situation up both respectfully and with admirable clarity: "Wet Leg's adopted donkeys have died after illness". I recommend reading the item in full. It's an exemplary piece of journalism. I won't attempt to precis it, other than to say that "late 30s" seems like a very good age for a donkey and even twenty-two isn't bad going. 

I know there's been some shade cast on the concept of donkey sanctuaries in the past, their very existence being framed as evidence of some kind of moral malaise, but I've always been in favor of them. Donkeys are gentle animals and many of them have a hard life. I don't see why they shouldn't have some comfort in their later years. If I had a nice place in the country with grounds I'd be happy to have a donkey or two wandering about the place. 

As regular readers no doubt know to their cost, I'd find it wholly possible, even acceptable, to spin a couple of thousand words out of that news item but I can't help thinking everyone would be better served with a couple of sentences and a link on Twitter. A tweet would also stand a much better chance of starting a cascade of debate on the nature of charitable giving, the relative status of grief and bereavement, the foibles of the rich and/or famous and any number of other potentially stimulatiing topics. Here on the blog the news will just lie down and die quietly, much like the donkeys who inspired it.

Then again, is that such a bad thing? Wasn't one of the reasons I never took to Twitter a nagging concern that a throwaway remark or an ill-considered witticism might spiral out of control? On a blog, about the worst you're likely to get is a snarky comment or two, not a torrent of death threats.

For example, take the next two items that surprised me this week. Firstly there was revelation that Frank Ocean is apparently a big fan of Garden Center. Not garden centers, you understand, though for all I know Frank may enjoy a stroll around the gnomes of a Sunday, as anyone might. No, this is Garden Center, the indie supergroup from Brighton.

I learned this from Stereogum, where it was reported that "Frank Ocean is a fan, and he’s played Garden Centre on his Blonded show a bunch of times." That was in a piece about the band's upcoming album, Searching For A Stream, which is confusingly both "coming out this fall" and "out 5/19" according to the article.

I wasn't much taken with latest song off the album but I do like the single they put out last month. Here they are doing it live. It sounds unnervingly like Genesis circa Nursery Crymes to me, which goes no way at all towards explaining why Frank Ocean might favor the band when programming his shows.

The second of the pair of items I mentioned was the news that Questlove is set to direct Disney's forthcoming live-action remake of The Aristocats. When I read that, on both NME and Pitchfork, I was initially more taken aback at the idea of live cats playing dixieland jazz than the attachment of Questlove to the project, although it did seem to be an off-center choice for Disney, not least because Questlove has heretofore only directed one (Albeit hugely acclaimed.) music documentary, Summer of Soul. 

Then again, there is a lot of jazz in the original movie, which is set in pre-First World War Paris, although until I looked it up just now I thought it was the 1920s. The Aristocats was, for a long time, my favorite Disney movie. It may well still be, although a cursory glance at the clips on YouTube suggest any number of problematic characters and themes. 

I don't honestly remember it that clearly. I saw it at the cinema, on release, when I was however old that would have made me... twelve, I think, which actually sounds a bit above the target age, now I come to think about it. I saw it a second time in the 1980s or '90s, in circumstances that now escape me. The high esteem in which I've always held it has more to do with it having a lot of cats in than any genuine artisitic merit, I now realise.

I was aware that Disney were in the process of remaking their entire animated catalog in live-action format but I hadn't been paying that much attention. I did hear quite a bit of chatter about whether the Lion King remake was too uncanny-valley, with the hyper-realistic fur and the lyp-synching not quite achieving gestalt, but I hadn't really thought long or hard about it.

Somehow, the idea of animals like the Aristocats, who already look and act like humans, wear clothes (Well, hats and neckerchiefs.), play musical instruments and the like, being represented in "live action" feels weirder and a bigger stretch than the more regular animals like the elephants in Dumbo or the cast of The Jungle Book. I was picturing actual cats as hep cats and it was concerning.

Reading the news more carefully, I see the plan is for a “live-action/hybrid reimagining”, which makes a lot more sense. With that out of the way, however, I was left with the uncomfortable realisation that, in reacting with any level of surprise to either Frank Ocean's or Questlove's involvement in these stories, I was possibly displaying inadvertent, conditioned racism.

It's uncomfortable to realise that it may be the notion of an African American celebrity choosing to enjoy something that seems, on the surface, very white indeed, be that twee/post-punk indie bands from British seaside towns or the unreconstructed white hegemony represented by classic Disney, that causes the disconnect. At some barely recognised level (Except, of course, I'm recognizing it now.) it feels like streams are being crossed. 

Which is fundementally a racist position, I guess. Anyone can like anything, can't they? I bloody well hope so, anyway. That'd be my position. But I'm aware of where those kind of broad, utopian strokes can lead. It's one thing to engage in some fairly abstract, gentle self-interrogation on a long-form blog, where, hopefully, nuance can be found; quite another to fire off a contextless tweet complete with astonished face emoji. (You can have emojis on Twitter, right? See, I don't even know that much for certain. I didn't even realise there was a button in Blogger to add them to a post until this moment 😲 😳)

I'd like to think I'd have been on safer ground with the last pair of stories that made me momentarily wish I was a twitterer. The first and less amusing of the two is the news that there could be a remake of the X-Files on the way. 

In theory, this could make a trio with the last two in that the director of this  - once again - very white show is reputed to be Ryan Coogler, but as it happens, I didn't even think of that until now because I didn't recognise his name, something which, I understand, has implications of its own. 

I was more concerned with the information that the revamp won't feature either Mulder or Scully, which on the face of it sounds a bit like staging Romeo and Juliet without the leads. I was a big X-Files fan back in the '90s, to the extent that I didn't just watch every single episode but recorded them all on VHS tapes - which I still have! 

Then again, I taped a lot of stuff back in the '90s. I was obsessed with building an archive, something that now feels both ironic and yet oddly prescient, in view of some of the things I was saying just a couple of days ago. 

I've never watched any of it back and by now I probably couldn't even if I wanted to. Shame I didn't pick a better storage medium. That's largely because a) tastes change and b) new stuff keeps coming. I lost interest in the X-Files to the extent that, until I read the article yesterday, I didn't even realise there'd already been one reboot that did feature the iconic duo. 

I guess if I didn't care about that I shouldn't care that they won't be in the next one. And I don't. But I bet someone will. Maybe it wouldn't have been safer ground for a tweet after all.

Finally, something I really can't imagine anyone getting het up over, something the very idea of which does just straight up make me laugh. Jarvis Cocker has a cameo in Wes Anderson's new movie, Asteroid City... as a cowboy.

Oh, come on! That's hilarious!

Cocker has also "contributed to the film’s soundtrack", which seems a litle more plausible. As it turns out, this is neither Pulp frontman's first collaboration with Anderson, nor his acting debut. He played Tip Top, a chanteur, performing a histrionic cover of the 1979 French-language hit "Aline" (original by Christophe) in a promotional video. 

In it, Jarvis was animated, by which I mean he was a cartoon. Okay, I'm not making this any clearer, am I? Jarvis is often animated and cartoonish. This time, though, he was hand-drawn. I'm not sure it counts as acting. Let's hope the cowboy Jarvis is live action. I'd pay to see that.

I would pay to see Asteroid City even without Jarvis in chaps. I wouldn't say I'm a Wes Anderson fan as such but I have seen a number of his movies and enjoyed them all. I can see why he annoys the hell  out of some people but I like the self-referential artificiality that's become his hallmark. The trailer for the new movie looks fantastic but trailers often outdo the main feature. We'll have to see.

If I do get around to watching it, I won't be tweeting my thoughts. They'll pop up here as always. Twitter is over as a cultural force, perhaps, or perhaps not. It's still too early to be sure. I can say, though, that its travails and troubles no longer feature in my daily news feeds the way they did a few months back. 

The last I heard was a report that the massive staff cuts have left Twitter's infrastructure hanging by a thread. Even if I wanted to get on board, which I still don't, it looks like the ship has sailed, even if it hasn't quite yet sunk.

I think I'll stick to blogging.

"What Are We Doing Here? I Dunno. But Here We Are!"

I had absolutely no intention of following one music post with another. That would just be cruel. I also had absolutely no intention of commenting on the Grammys this year. I did it once and I think I got away with it but there's no sense tempting fate.

However, sometimes circumstances conspire and things happen that simply can't be ignored. This is one them.

Bizarrely - or perhaps not, if you follow my methodology - there's no tag for Wet Leg on this blog. There really should be, since I keep writing about them. (And there is, now.) A search query finds ten posts, just about all of them including a video. Anyone would think I liked them or something.

I first wrote about the band on July 22 2021, the same day I discovered them by way of a post on Everett True's now-dormant blog How NOT To Write About Music, a problem Everrett seems to have solved pretty handily by just stopping. I have no plans to follow his lead in that regard but I thank him once again for introducing me to the band he originally, if wildly inaccurately, assumed to be "some corporate-funded suck-ass rich kid duo from the Midwest of America".

As everyone now knows, they are not. They're from the Isle of Wight. At the time, that was pretty much all anyone did know about them. As they've risen to international fame, more has been revealed, including much that contradicts and confounds some of the more romantic myths about how the band was formed. They do not, after all, appear to have fallen quite so green from the tree as once was thought.

Still, they have no real form before the astonishing reveal that introduced their laconic, affectless, whimsical motorik drone to the world in a video now revealed to be the Best Alternative Music Performance of last year - in the eyes of the Grammy electorate, at least. Even if it actually arrived the year before. 

The band seem as bemused by the whole thing as, frankly, I am. I mean, to be nominated for the Mercury is one thing, even if you lose, but I always think of the Grammys as an exceptionally American institution. I'm kind of surprised to find any UK acts in the nominations at all. 

Added to that, when you consider the other UK artists who also got recognized this year, specifically the ones against whom Wet Leg were competing, you're looking at bands who've been around for years; bands with global profiles: Arctic Monkeys and Florence and the Machine. And the rest of the nominees included Bjork ffs!

Not that the video for Chaise Longue doesn't deserve to be included in its category, where the list of nominees was strikingly similar. It's one of the best pop videos period, let alone the best "alternative" and not just of last year but of all time. The song, too, is a classic. I hope its creators remain as fond of it twenty-five years from now, when it's undoubtedly still going to be the one number from their back catalog they'll still absolutely have to play at every gig.

It's a big assumption, that Wet Leg will still be a thing going into the second half of the 21st century but these days no-one ever stops and one signature tune everyone remembers and can yell along to is pretty much all you're ever going to need. Of course, having just won what's probably the biggest award in popular music for making the best album in their weight class, first time out, no less, chances are they'll have more than one song to remember them by, come 2050.

Right now, though, I imagine the whole thing seems like a fever dream. When Rhian Teasdale made the first acceptance speech, for the Performance award she made no attempt to conceal her disbelief. With glorious understatement she observed "This year has been so surprising". For all of us, Rhian.

It's puzzled me for a while, the way every news report, review or opinion piece on Wet Leg refers to the band as a duo. It seems odd to relegate the other three musicians to the role of sidemen. It was heartening, then, to see drummer Henry Holmes take the mic for the second award and even more heartening to hear him describe the band as "one big, fucked up family." 

Given the exceptional level of fame and success this DIY project has achieved in just a couple of years, I suspect they're going to need that level of emotional support as they build what could and most likely will be a long and successful career. My closing comments from a year and a half ago, when I expressed doubt that the promised "string of releases", planned to follow Chaise Longue would ever materialize, look pretty silly now.

To add an element of realism to this otherwise positively surreal story, Wet Leg did not win the biggest award they were up for last night. While they dominated the relatively niche "Alternate" categories, they were unsuccessful in the much more prestigious, non-genre-based "Best New Artist". That was taken by Samara Joy, a jazz singer of some repute, with whose work I am wholly unfamiliar.

A typically wilful and idiosyncratic selection by the electorate, some might say. I couldn't possibly comment. I'll let Chris deVille at Stereogum do that for me:

"You never want to rule out the chance that the Grammys will reward a jazz artist just to remind you they’re the Grammys. Young singer Samara Joy could feasibly pull an Esperanza Spalding, given that she’s unleashing her rich alto on music that feels like it was in the same ultra-respectable mid-20th century milieu where many in the Academy’s brains seem stuck."

Curiously, despite having been a very early adopter, a fan to the extent of having a framed copy of one of their seven-inch singles on my wall, I don't really listen to Wet Leg all that often. They may have won the award for best album but they seem to me to be an archetypal singles band, best suited to be heard booming unexpectedly out of the windows of a passing car as it cruises by with all the windows wound down or popping up, suddenly and joyously, on MTV or whatever passes for music television these days. A whole album's a bit too much of a good thing. I find listening to it all the way through feels a bit like eating an entire box of chocolates on my own, self-indulgent and ulitimately enervating.

Anyway, congratulations to them all and here's to whatever they'll do next. One thing's for sure; the world's going to be watching, now. 

So, no pressure there, guys...