Run The Jewels

Right now, Run The Jewels are on top of the world. Their latest album, 2014’s RTJ2, is yet another hit in a string of successes, both critically and commercially, that have seen the rap duo become one of the toast of the hip-hop community.

But things have not always been this way. The tale of how these two struggling, middle aged, down on their luck, underdog MCs rose to the top could have been plucked straight out of Hollywood.

Our story starts in the dark old days of 2009, and the future members of Run The Jewels have yet to meet.

34 year old Michael Render, better known by his stage name Killer Mike, had been in the rap game for a whole decade by this point. Killer Mike had debuted strong; his first album appearance being with rap royalty Outkast, and other high profile collaborations were still to come, including a spot on Jay-Zs 2001 album The Blueprint 2.

His debut album sold well, with the first single featuringon NFL 2004, and his second single worked its way up to #60 on the billboard top 100. Further success was still to come, when Mike scored his only top 40 hit featuring alongside Bone Crusher on the hit ‘Never Scared’.

But the mid-noughties were not an easy time to be a musical artist, and certainly not for such a politically charged voice as Killer Mikes. His subsequent albums scored well with the critics, who applauded his “conscious desire to knock some sense into you” and robust technical proficiency, but sales dwindled and prospects looked grim.

 "I was disappointed because I felt like I had spent a career working to still be viewed as a protégé. So I said, 'Fuck this shit. I'm gonna join the church.'"

Likewise; producer, rapper and entrepreneur Jaime Meline was the toast of the underground rap scene, but had also fallen on hard times by 2009.

Jaime started young in music, forming record label Company Flow with a friend soon after his 18^th birthday and operating under the pseudonym El-Producto.

For the next 2 decades El-P (as he’s known these days) would be a major force in alternative hip-hop. As CEO of Definitive Jux, El-P created a home for many small but gifted acts, including RJD2 and Aesop Rock. And, as an artist, Jaime released a number of albums that came out to rave reviews. El-P’s rapping style is dense, witty and aggressive. His production is bleak, paranoid and claustrophobic. But even a much lauded Pitchfork-best-music review was not enough to bring significant album sales, and Definitive Jux was eventually put on hiatus in 2010.

Our dynamic duo were first brought together by, of all people, the creative director of Adult Swim. Jason DeMarco had only recently set-up Williams Street Records to distribute the music that accompanies the irreverent, cult adult cartoons Adult Swim produces.

DeMarco knew Killer Mike from his voice work on Frisky Dingo and The Boondocks, and would later meet El-P as his new record label produced the video for El-Ps ‘Flyentology’.

It was DeMarco’s idea to introduce the two, and so on one fateful day in a studio in Atlanta, the forces that would become Run The Jewels met for the first time, and the rest is, as they say, history.

Their first collaboration was on Killer Mikes 2012 solo L.P ‘R.A.P Music’, which El-P both produced and featured on. From its opening moments, R.A.P Music made it clear that this collaboration was a meeting of equals, as a slinky, shuffling, shimmering electronic beat introduces Killer Mikes explosive preaching.

The album itself is a politically charged look back on Killer Mikes relationship with rap music. On one hand, Mike lays into other rappers habit of “inciting bullshit” and encouraging wasteful violence, but at the same time the album is riddled with nods to the seminal works of the genre.

For the title track and album closer, El-P provides an almighty beat for Mike to spit over. The result is a powerful and heartfelt stomp through the history of ‘Rebellious African People’ and, in my opinion, the best track of 2012.

Elsewhere, the paranoid and creeping sound that El-P has spent his career perfecting provide the backdrop for some of Killer Mikes finest storytelling, as the M.C leads us through the seedy history of theReagan government and the story of an illegal house raid gone awry.

For a victory lap, merely months after R.A.P Music’s release, the duo struck again with the free mixtape Run The Jewels. The mixtape displayed two pros kicking back and enjoying themselves.

The shit-talking abounds, and the pair uses their talents to kick out track-after-track of fist banging anthems and instantly enjoyable songs. There is still the trademark dystopian vibe to the overall sound, but now the gleefully outlandish threats and wide grinning jokes give the whole project an infectiously entertaining aura, as if the record would feel most at home blasting from a boombox on a street corner.

It was on this mixtape, too, that the pair’s personalities would first begin to converge and the chemistry of Jaime and Mike would begin to take solid form.

But nothing, nothing at all so far, could prepare the world for how fucking good 2014s Run The Jewels 2 is.

There is not a single dull moment on RTJ2. It’s one of the flat out tightest records I’ve ever heard, and it’s the sound of seasoned veterans being utterly ambitious. Over its 40 minute run time both MCs spit verse after verse of solid rhymes and the album is, from start to finish, sonically outstanding.

The dynamic is fantastic, as Run The Jewels continue with their M.O to utterly destroy the “fuckboys”; the bullshit spouting people who make the world a worse place.

Killer Mike departs from his usual style of weaving political awareness into narratives and instead goes full on wrecking ball mode, using his booming voice to call out the injustices of racism and other inequalities.

At the same time, El-P ducks and weaves with his lyrical punches, an outraged witness out for blood.

RTJ2 is a rare beast: an album balanced between being entertaining and genuinely funny, but at the same time sincere and profound.

It’s a destructive force of righteous anger, a middle finger to the system, and an absolute fucking blast.

"Run The Jewels is the answer. The question’s what’s popping."

Five Years 2010-2015

To talk about the state of music as it is today, without any benefit of hindsight, would seem like an arrogantly bold move. But the fact is the task is made so much easy by the current, catch all sonic landscape. All these years of musical experimentation and technological innovation has given todays artists an unparalleled palette with which to make music, but more importantly, I think the internet has allowed listeners to expand their tastes immeasurably. This was mostly true throughout the 2000s, where anything really went, but you still got the impression back then that there were genres. Yes, the lines were blurring as artists took on influences from other genres, but there were still lines.

Instead, todays music, seems to comfortably straddle genres, inhabiting a world where artists can comfortably make music without established scenes, knowing that someone, out there on the internet, can find and like it on it’s own merits. What genre is Channel Orange? Mainly its an R&B album with glimmering pop, there are guest rap spots by Earl Sweatshirt and Andre 3000 and the overall vibe is distinctly indie.

Defining indie is the hardest job in the world, it’s such a broad umbrella term, but in general it refers to music that seems intimate, private, thoughtful. And that’s Channel Orange all over, it starts with the jingle of a PS1 booting up, putting listeners in the mindset of teenagers alone in their bedroom.

The blend of genres in this next track seems impossible. House music is grounded in repetition, in building a groove steadily and strongly over 8 to 20 minutes, for the groove to find its way deep into the audience, for people to dance the whole night through. Pop music on the other hand is built to be ear catching, brief and varied. Anything goes in pop music, as long as its entertaining and doesn’t out stay it’s welcome.

Only one band in the past can claim to have even come close to uniting these two disparate genres. Basement Jaxxs music, as brilliant as it is, seems to flip between the two, breaking house music up with manic reggae preachers, whistles, whooshes, sound effects and keeping all their songs at a radio friendly run time.

On the other hand, these two, literally kids, have made music that is undeniably house. It has a sense of patience and groove not found anywhere in pop, despite the fact that their debut album no less, has become a smash hit. 

 Just because there are no longer these thriving, united pushes in music scenes doesn’t mean there aren’t any trends to be aware of. As I’ll discuss later, rock, especially in the mainstream, has been on a great decline. Glistening and weird pop, though, is very in vogue. 

 The following band made their name for themselves with a trilogy of indie rock oriented concept albums about the life of a son of a prostitute in an oppressive 19^th century fantasy city. Once they’d tied that all up in 2009, they recorded an EP of 4 songs in the style of each 9 colours in the colour spectrum, effectively producing a folk E.P, a metal E.P, a hard rock E.P etc. I could honestly play something from each one, they’re all brilliant, but this is off of their Indigo record. 

 My favourite current artist is also very much responsible for moving genres into this broad space. Kanye Wests is like a modern day David Bowie, he is restless with any one persona and shifts musically album by album. To those only aware of his public persona, brash, egotistical and just a little bit mental, to hand him such high praise seems unjust. But that part of his head that doesn’t stop him from 20 minute, auto-tuned rants at festivals his greatest asset. Kanye West does not hold the ability to doubt himself. He is truly fearless. And this can be seen in his astounding creativity. Definitely more than any other rapper, Kanye puts his emphasis on the music.

His lines may, quite often, be plain old naff, but his sense of rhyme and impassioned delivery give them such a provocative energy. The beats on his latest album, Yeezus, sound more like metal than rap, he auto-tunes Billie Holiday and samples eastern European prog music. On 808 and heartbreaks, he attempted, some would say unsuccessfully, to create a modern day blues unhinged and off kiltered by alien autotune. And his 2010 magnus opus, My Beautiful, Dark Twisted Fantasy mixed everything, like, just, everything into a lush, bombastic masterpiece.

I couldn’t bring up rap music in the past five years without bringing up Kendrick Lamaar. Good Kid, Mad City has only been out for 2 and a half years now, but is already being heralded as one of the best albums of all time, and definitely one of the best rap albums. 

One noticeable thing about current music is the utter decline of rock. Sure bands like The Black Keys, Jack White, Kasabian, Queens of the Stone Age, Arctic Monkeys remain popular, but they’ve all been around from the early 2000s. More than that, those bands are diluting the rock sound with other aspects. Yeah, AM by Arctic Monkeys was great and hugely popular, but now their sound borrows a decidedly not-rock drum machine from hip-hop and they’ve let R&B influence them.

Who’s to say why this is. If I was to have a punt at it, I’d say the internet has opened up the music of the past to this current generation in a way never seen before. Any tech-savvy kid, which lets face it, is all of them, can illegally download the entire catalogue of Led Zeppelin, AC/DC or Nirvana in an instant. Rock musicians aren’t just competing with each other, they now have to contest the entire history of rock, which is frankly an impossible task. And why would rock kids sit around reading Kerrang magazine when they can get a compilation of 80 fantastic songs with a plastic guitar for their Xbox for £15 in a Game bargain bucket?

That’s not to say there isn’t fantastic rock being made, just most people aren’t listening to it, and these rockers are fighting different battles. It’s not enough just to rock. Parquet Courts rock, but with brains and style. This next band however, embrace the youth and energy of rock as if their very life depends on it. My old housemate compared them to watching me play Rock Band, and that was a far more acute observation than he realised, because tied into the loundness and ferocity of their music is also this hunger for stardom that they’re well aware is a mere fantasy, but push at as if breaking out is the only option left to them. 

 Now, just as the internet has had a huge impact on the demand side of music; that is, the way people consume their music, modern technology has also revolutionised the way, and reason, people make music. Ed Harrison was an amateur game developer when he was recruited off of some forums to work on the sound design of a fan made mod to the hugely  popular PC video game Half Life 2. He ended up recording an absolutely staggering soundtrack, entitled Neotokyo, which stands perfectly well on its own as a fantastic album. His compostitions blend minimal techno with a vast array of oriental, acoustic instruments to create a paranoid, overbearing cyberpunk masterpiece, and best of all the whole album is available free of charge on the internet.

 Whatever changes happen in music, there will always be talented songwriters, crafting away. From Laura Stevensons criminally underrated second album, Wheel, this track is called Renee.

One of the impressive aspects of todays music scene is the way there is still a receptive audience for older, established artists, who in turn are changing up their styles to create stuff that’s wonderfully new. Blues Funeral by Mark Lanegan Band, marries Marks wonderful, whiskey and heroin stained voice with trance inducing electronica and big beats. Nothing sounds quite like the eclectic mix of odd instruments utilised by PJ Harvey on 2011s Let England Shake, and her deeply humanist, politically aware and anti-war sentiments hit a nerve with critics and consumers alike.

Graham Coxon and Paul Weller have both gone stomping around krautrock for inspiration while Damon Alburn continues his attempts to be this generations David Byrne, introducing western audiences to world music and experimenting with modern technology, going as far as composing an album solely on an iPad. In 2013, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds took another left turn in their long and brilliant history with Push the Sky Away. Inspired apparently by late nights spent surfing Wikipedia, Cave and co. pre-empt the Snowden revelations and increasing awareness of NSA activity with an atmosphere of oppressive paranoia and fear. This is Higgs Boson Blues

The question overhanging todays music, though, is, does the consumption via playlists and mp3s and promotion less midnight launches devalue music. In the old days, getting an album was an event. I can only piece together the experience from listening to older music fans, but the talk enthusiastically of taking the journey to the record store, the personal expense, the physical presence of an album and how this all added to the experience, and significance of the music. But also, it seems in the past music had a lot more to do with identity. The cost prohibited young people from listening to everything, so what you listened to said something about who you were. And there was so much more change in society to fight for. Were you a punk and violently against the grey establishment? Were you arty and cool going round with your Dark Side of the Moon vinyl or were you rallying against racial inequality with Whats Going On? Were you hip with your Nike high-tops and your Run DMC, or were you dark and angry with your Black Sabbath and your head banging brethren?

Now, in an age when a dozen albums are vying for your attention every week, and you can pick and choose songs at will on iTunes, or just put on endless playlists that scatter tracks from across time and genres, is something lost? When the only real constraint on what you can listen to is your amount of free time, can music matter as much? Is music in the digital age as important?

All those points are valid, but I’d argue ever broadening your musical horizons means you’re a lot more likely to find that one album that matters to you more than anyone else. Whatever niche your preference for music falls into, you can now find a perfect record tailored to that taste. Less than music being a label to associate with, this way of consuming music allows for greater individuality. And yes, some impact is lost by removing those external factors, but that only puts emphasis on what’s in the music.

But most of all, it allows for a cultural shift away from fighting the outside world, and to fighting the inside world. This is WU LYF. And this is Heavy Pop

Five Years 2000-2005

The turn of a new century bought with it many artists pushing at the boundaries of music, both technically and emotionally. And, while this could rightly be seen as just further musical progression, there was something about the boldness and enthusiasm with which the artists of this period made their advances that really stands out.

The pop of the early noughties glimmered and shone, and indie moved in a direction of earnestness and heartfelt emotion. Other genres mixed and collided with glorious aplomb, giving the era a wealth of wonderful new sounds.

At the forefront of this musical change was the Toronto music scene, and that was Godspeed You! Black Emperor with part 1 of Storm; Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. Canada is famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) for their many indie acts and thriving hipster scene, but Toronto is especially well known for its avant garde post rock, where violins and horn sections coexist with synthesisers and distortion in compositions well over 20 minutes.

An interesting project these musicians came out with was Broken Social Scene, a loose collective of ever changing musicians drawn from the area around Toronto, only playing more traditional pop music, or atleast, their take on traditional pop music. This is Almost Crimes off of their seminal 2002 album You Forgot It In People

Easily the most famous band to come out of Canada in the early 2000s was Arcade Fire. It amazes me how for every Arcade Fire fan there is another person who despises the band, but when I think about it, it makes sense.

Win Butlers skinny voice and incredibly earnest, heartfelt and raw lyrics makes the band sound whinier than it is, but the way the marching band drums and soaring string section hurtles each moment of the song giddily into the next gives their music breath-taking energy.

When Funeral came out in 2004, Arcade Fires rallying cry against apathy, depression and hate found itself a home in the bedrooms of wide eyed teenagers across the world, becoming an instant classic, while at the same time drawing fire from the older generations who saw it as no more than shallow emo drowning in pretence. I’ll let you make your mind up for yourselves about it.

The influence of classical music on pop and rock also showed up on a number of other brilliant albums. Artist like The National, Regina Spektor, Iron and Wine and Joanna Newsom became synonymous with chamber pop or baroque rock in the early noughties, all paving the way for the absolute explosion in this genre in the second half of the new decade.

Perhaps the apex of chamber pop was Sufjan Steven’s Come On & Feel The Illinoise!, a delicate and beautiful concept album about the people, history and geography of the state of Illinois. This is the albums centre piece about the state capital. 

While some artists were utilising classical arrangements to portray the confidence and hope going into a new millennium, others were torturing samplers and synthesisers to represent the anxiety and fear the uncertain, globalised future holds. 

I struggle to explain the surge in severely depressed, introverted music that came out around the start of the millennium. Obviously, the link between depression and music stretches back way, way, way farther than the 2000s, but the ubiquity of albums that talked candidly about the black dog was certainly unprecedented.

Perhaps it was fear of the future, or perhaps it was a response to the substance-less angst of the 90s. Maybe websites like Pitchfork.com were redirecting listeners from rock to bands that filled a more personal niche, or cynically maybe a wave of bands were just inspired to borrow the formula from Radiohead.

Perhaps, the internet and headphones were altering peoples listening habits, allowing music to become more personal.

Or, as I like to hope, society had progressed to a point where it was acceptable to talk about these feelings. 

That track was off of the brilliant Emergency & I, where the Dismemberment Plan portray depression as a distorted, alien mess with gurgling moogs, oddball synths, panic stricken guitar attacks and deliberately clumsy and a little unhinged lyrics.

On the other hand, Modest Mouse portray the illness as an endless freezing expanse devoid of life on The Moon and Antarctica, the tracks bleeding into one another in a continuous piece. The genius of the album is the way this sonic landscape glimmers and shines. Using a huge variety of instruments, Modest Mouse create beautiful vistas of sadness.

It would be wrong to say these bands wallowed in their sadness. More, they communicated the experience through their music. Other bands though put forward an antidote to their problems. I strongly suggest tracking down the documentary Fearless Freaks, which heart-breakingly captures the disintegration of The Flaming Lips circa 1999.

An eccentric bunch of goofball artists; drug addiction, dying parents, member walkouts and commercial failure pushed the group to the edge. The scene where the bands resident genius, Steven Drozd, explains the effects his heroin addiction has had on his life while shooting up is frankly one of the most moving scenes I’ve ever seen committed to film.

The resulting albums, 1999s The Soft Bulletin and 2002s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, fight back against turmoil and mortality with bright, kaleidoscopic aural gymnastics and go for broke optimism.

In pop music, bands explored technology to incredible results. In Australia, 2 DJs and their collaborators poured themselves into an absolute labour of love. Utilising an estimated 3,500 samples, Since I Left You by The Avalanches is an achievement by all possible benchmarks. Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Georgia, in just 5 short minutes, one band would take the rulebook of music and blast it into outerspace at a million miles an hour.

How to Eat

I was planning on doing a series of posts about my favourite recipes, but to be honest I could spare myself the time by just linking to the original source. Instead, here’s a little commentary on how to eat well as a student.Like I said in my “Fajitas!” post, the key to good, cheap food is getting your act together with some friends/housemates. The following recipes comfortably fill 3 people and cost more or less £3.

General Advice

It’s a cliché, but preparation really does prevent piss poor performance. Make sure the kitchen is clean enough to cook in before you start anything, and get the ingredients and utensils out first. This is so you don’t get half way through the meal and realise you’re missing the vital ingredient and also you don’t end up running about frantically looking for your lentils. If you don’t own a garlic crusher and a tin opener already, go buy them now, you’re going to need them for practically every meal.

A sharp knife makes a world of difference; suddenly dicing ingredients is sorta fun and it’s actually safer (because now your food isn’t being pushed around and there’s less chance of the knife slipping).

How to cut an onion.

It’s good practice to have a store cupboard filled with pasta, rice, sun-dried tomatoes, tinned plum tomatoes, passata, coconut milk, tinned black olives, tinned tuna, thai green curry paste and tinned anchovies.

As far as spices go, you want to keep some dried coriander, cumin, garam masala, curry powder, hot chilli powder, Cajun seasoning, chicken & vegetable stock, MSG (yes, it’s safe) and white pepper handy. The best place to get all of this stuff is Lidl or Aldi.

Waitrose is actually fantastic value for money as long as you buy the right things. Their own brand products are always cheaper than the big brands and are just as good, and their chefs ingredients (the fresh herbs, chillies, ginger etc.) are the same price as Tesco’s but many times nicer.

The veg there does cost more, but it’s still less expensive than meat from anywhere, so as long as you’re substituting out some of the meat in your diet you can afford to treat yourself. 
Having said that, if you are buying meat Waitrose is not the place to get it. Sainsbury’s strike a great compromise between cost and quality (also, their sausages are a delicious bargain).

There’s an app/extension called “Pocket” that saves websites offline, so you can check these recipes from your phone without waiting for the internet to connect.

Curries

Curries are amazing; they’re the most fun to cook and can turn a few cheap ingredients into a delicious meal. I share a love of seasonal veg with good ol’ Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and while his curry recipes have only a passing relation to traditional Indian cooking, it is yummy and cheap.

Butternut Squash Curry          £1.90/person

-Waitrose sell butternut squash already frozen and cut up, this is a huge time saver!

-This curry tastes amazing if you put in a generous dash of MSG.

-Soak the lentils for about an hour

-Yoghurt is essential

Spinach and Egg Curry                                                       £3/person

-Probably the tastiest recipe here, but the eggs take WAY longer than 5 minutes to soft boil.

Thai Green Curry Bake                                                  £3.20/person

-Super easy but in my experience it takes more like 30 minutes for the rice to fluff than 20

-If you don't have a lid tin foil works just as well

Lamb Curry                                                                    £4.45/person

-Expensive, a lot of work, but absolutely delicious

-Soak the lamb in yoghurt overnight to make it fall apart in your mouth

-You can buy a joint of lamb for this that is perfect from Aldi for £4.50

Pasta

Who knew, pasta is cheap and tasty!

Ham and Leek Spaghetti                                               £2.80/person

Tuna Linguine                                                               £2.10/person

Anchovy, Olive and Sun-dried Tomato Fusili              £2.50/person

-Be way more generous with your ingredients than Nigel

Rice Dishes

Egg Fried Rice                                                               £1.60/person

Chicken Jambalaya                                                        £2.50/person

Potatoes

Spanish Omlette                                                             £1.90/person

Sausage and Mash                                                          £2/person

-Go crazy with that butter

-Bisto gravy powder is the best

Five Years - 1995-2000

 

On 14th August 1995, Blur and Oasis respective labels released these two tracks as single on the same day as an ingenious marketing stunt. The resulting news coverage turned the fight for no.1 into a nationwide event. The race drew on our nations bitter class warfare, as the Northern working class championed the far superior Oasis while soft middle class southerners cheered on Blur (no bias). Ultimately, Country House won the top spot and Damon Alburn ended up being interviewed on the 10’o’clock news, such had the conflict captured the nation’s attention. This conflict is typically used to represent the peak of an era known as Britpop, although ironically, neither song was anywhere near the bands best, nor do the two bands accurately portray just what a great decade the UK had in music. 
A wealth of talented rock musicians put out incredible albums over these five years. Paul Weller put out perhaps the best album of his career, including The Jam and The Style Council. The Manic Street Preachers released yet another great album with Everything Must Go, PJ Harvey released two fantastic albums, as did Radiohead. And Supergrass. And Pulp. And Spiritualised. And the sorely underrated Gomez. Not to mention Belle and Sebastian’s streak of 3 classic LPs and 4 incredible EPs.

   

The quality rock music was but part of the UKs contributions to this period of music. One of the key elements of the late 90s was a renaissance in electronic music, spearheaded by the pioneering UK independent record label, Warp Records. They signed often challenging bands that pushed the boundaries of what was both technically possible and sonically unprecedented, such as Autechre, Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin. 
 For many people though, UK electronica, or IDM as the yanks like to call it, begins and ends with Richard D. James, one of the most inventive and influential figures in contemporary music. Under various pseudonyms, but most notably Aphex Twin, he built his own recording software, which he distributed for free over the internet, created infamous, nightmarish music videos and composed music in a variety of styles, from ambient to rave. Amazingly his challenging music somehow scored him a top 20 hit with this track, delightfully entitled Windowlicker  

Obviously electronic music predates the 1990s, typically being credited as a German invention from the 1970s, by artists like Gottfried Michael Koenig and Kraftwerk. But most will agree that Brian Eno deserves a place amongst the pioneers of genre, and it’s no surprise to see the artists of the 90s pay the man tribute. 
This track is a cover of an Eno song by two electronic artists, the British band Stereolab and the American artist U.I, collaborating. For this release they went by the moniker Uilab and this track is called St. Elmos Fire 

Where the artists of Warp records used electronic instruments to create caustic, uncomfortable music, and acts like Uilab created hypnotising pop music, other musicians used synthesised instruments to create cold and alien atmospheres with which they fleshed out their compositions. 
Triphop, born in Bristol, was an experimental genre that combined backbeats with melancholy electronica and influences from soul, funk and jazz. The defining bands of the genre like Portishead and Massive Attack also happened to be from the UK.

When the Brits weren’t directly responsible for the great music, our heritage of music was having an undeniable influence abroad. In response to the angst, sarcasm and heaviness that was defining the US music scene, many American indie acts chose to instead turn back to the joyous psychedelia of 1960s England for influence.
Neutral Milk Hotel resurrected that old cliché of an idea, the concept album. There 1998 cult classic In The Aeroplane Over The Sea broadened the horizons of indie in sound and subject manner, utilising a truck load of quirky instrument;, from the zanzithophone, to the flugelhorne, euphonium and uillean pipes. The concept was even broader, an abstract fever dream about life, death, religion and the love of a woman who died before you were ever even born. And while my description makes that sound pretentious, Neutral Milk Hotel make it sound effortless, joyful and alive, if not completely odd.

We Brits are known for our arrogance, me, doubly so. But it would be just factually wrong to pretend that the UK was the only country making great music in the late 90s. It would be much more accurate to say that the decline in American rock music left our rock unopposed. Our contributions to electronica weren’t alone though, French acts like Daft Punk and Air were utilising samplers and synths brilliantly while US producer Timabaland completely altered the sound of pop. 
But, perhaps the most influential piece of technology in the 90s wasn’t a synthesiser, or a PC, or the internet or a sampler, but the cheap and humble 4-track recorder, which gave new life to the fruitful lo-fi scene of the early 1990s. Records from this era include the brilliant Bee Thousand from Guided By Voices, and my favourite album of all time, Slanted and Enchanted by Pavement. 
While more pretentious music fans would argue the tape hiss and poor audio quality are essential to the very soul of these, there’s no arguing that they sound dreadful. By the second half of the 90s innovations in technology meant home recording didn’t have to sound so amateurish. Bands were now able to produce professional sounding albums without the need for a studio.

It’s a shame this hour doesn’t give me time to delve into all the other brilliant music that came out in this time. The Scandanavians also had a great period, their metal bands like Opeth, Burzum, Dark Tranquility and In Flames redefined the genre, Refused released I’d argue the greatest punk album of all time and Bjork was, well, being Bjork. And I haven’t even mentioned the great rap, the great indie and all the great records that are much harder to pin down. 
For example, in 1996 DJ Shadow entered the Book of Guinness World Records for creating an album of nothing but samples. Much more impressive than this is just how brilliant this album is, Sputnik music have voted Endtroducing . . . . . the 38th greatest album of all time and Pitchfork.com put it at number 7 on their list of the best albums of the 1990s. 
But while Endtroducing may have been created using hip-hops methods, it shared little heritage with the boom-boom-tap of Run DMC. In reality it is effectively genreless. Over the course of its run time, DJ Shadow creates these pillowy cushions of ambience, horror film atmospheres, big beat rock, odd, funky little asides and asks “what does your soul like?”.

Fajitas!

Hey I’ve been trying to figure out what I can write about that is interesting and doesn’t require too much effort from me, so bam! I’m going to start writing up my recipes.

If any of you freshmen want a word of advice from someone who’s been here for 2 years now; move out of student halls as soon as you can and organise meals with your housemates. If you get your act together and everyone chip in the fair amount you’ll save a tonne of money and cooking for other people is so much more fun that just cooking for just yourself.

First up, here’s a little tweak on the classic fajita recipe.

Ingredients (Makes 4 17px fajitas)

Fajita, seasoning mix and salsa (Just get one of those El Paso packs or similar)

500g chicken breast

3 peppers (red or yellow)

A splash of oil

A block of cheddar

Before you do anything, preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Cover a baking tray in tinfoil, place the peppers intact on the tray and drizzle with oil. Put into the oven for 25 minutes, turning 3 times. You want the skins to go quite black.

While they’re cooking cover another tray in tinfoil. Slice down the chicken breasts making long strips and place on the tray. Cover evenly with the seasoning pack and wait until the peppers have been in for 10 minutes, then put the chicken in the oven for 25 minutes. (Wash your chopping board now!)

When the peppers are black all over take them out of the oven and somewhere to cool. Pick them up one at a time and place them on your cutting board. (Be careful they will be hot as all hell and pouring out boiling water). Using a knife and fork peel the peppers, scoop out the insides, peel them and cut them into long strips. The skin should just slide off effortlessly but expect to make a fair bit of mess; keep some kitchen role handy. Leave the slices on a plate.

Grate a tonne of cheese and keep that handy, then pierce the fajita pack and put it in the microwave ready. They only take 45 seconds to warm up, so don’t turn it on until the chickens ready.

When the chickens ready it’s just a case of assembling the things. Lay a strip of chicken and peppers down the middle of a fajita and add cheese and salsa to taste. Fold them up and enjoy!

Five Years 1980-1985

Though short-lived, the explosion of punk in the late 70s destroyed entire genres. Punk had an almost “year-zero” mentality, and hoped by cutting the fat down to three chords and two minutes they could drop the baggage popular music had been picking up since the 1960s. 

Overnight, the indulgent sounds of prog and bloated stadium rock were cast aside, and in their wake bands sought to take new directions. The bands that emerged in the wake of punk found themselves back at the drawing board, challenged with building something new to replace what had been torn down. These bands were helped by an environment infused with enthusiasm and possibilities, the D.I.Y ethos of punk made it seem that anyone could start a band, regardless of talent or whether there was even an audience that could possibly be receptive to their sound. 

In the U.K, the original bands that progressed from punk into something more had already poured out their finest offerings prior to 1980, with bands like Wire, The Pop Group, The Fall, Gang of Four, Public Image Ltd. and Joy Division having released their best albums already. It was the post-punk bands in America, mostly on SST records, who carried punk into weird and wonderful directions in the 1980s. 

That was Sonic Youth with Death Valley ’69, taking punk on an avant garde roller coaster through the murders of Charles Manson. The following are my picks for the best of American punk/post-punk in the 1980s.

Unlike the UK punk scene which was dominated by singles, making it difficult to properly get into now, all these tracks are cuts off of fantastic albums. The farthest out of the American post-punk bands, both geographically and metaphysically, was the Meat Puppets. 

Originally hardcore punks, as time went on they sunk into the baking sun of their native Arizona, propelled by a tonne of weed and hallucinogens. “We were so sick of the hardcore thing” the original drummer later claimed “we were really into pissing off the crowd”.

 Lead singer Curt Kirkwood moans like a wounded dog, his country influenced delivery leading to some critics labelling the band “cow-punk”. Their songs would often melt into formless soups and the lyrics concerned themselves with existentialism and the afterlife. 

On both sides of the Atlantic, bands were picking and choosing from the lessons and ethos of punk, picking up what they liked and ignoring what they didn’t. Brit bands like The Cure and Bauhaus utterly disposed with the straight forward, down to earth grittiness of punk and instead brought back arty glam-rock, albeit this time wearing only black and guy-liner. However, they held onto the energy and integrity that was the vital life-blood of punk. 

Bands looking for new sounds found themselves in a world ripe with possibilities. Synthesisers, sequencers and samplers were just becoming cheap enough to be practical options for musicians to explore. 

Joy Division had already explored the new possibilities technology had to offer in the late 70s, creating a cold, alien and distant atmosphere to complement Ian Curtis’ severely depressed musical direction. 

Following his suicide, the remaining members took influence from the New York City club scene and folded dance music into their sound, creating the band New Order. And while the abrasiveness of punk was absent from their music, New Orders status as the flagship of indie label Factory Records, their “no-image” image and reluctance to release singles with albums displayed their counter-mainstream ethos.

New Order were just one of the bands to return from the New York City club scene with fresh inspiration. In the left-field clubs of downtown New York, disco mutated and went underground, undergoing the long and mostly undocumented metamorphosis into hip-hop and rap music. 

DJs and MCs across the black and Caribbean neighbourhoods married turntable scratches, disco funk and dance with the first raps, creating something totally new. 

The problem is that these poor artists didn’t record, and much of the output associated with old-school hip-hop is nothing but record labels cashing in with poor imitations. The good-time raps and disco funk people associate with early hip-hop are completely artificial and much removed from even the actual process of recording hip-hop. Industry execs replaced DJs and turntables with session musicians, trying to shoe-horn in the sounds of motown and soul to peddle to a wider audience.

 Groups like The Sugarhill Gang, who are often confused as innovators, were nothing but a hugely successful marketing plan by Sylvia Robinson, stealing lyrics off of various rappers, most famously taking entire verses from Grandmaster Caz on their hit Rappers Delight, and never paying a dime in royalties. 

Unpretentious groups like ESG, however, managed to find themselves moderate success by virtue of their sheer talent and tightness, creating the dance music that would later make their way into hip-hop MCs  crates of vinyls. 

It was instead cultural appropriation by white artists that captured the best of this underground scene. One pair of famous millionaires living in New York at the time created the perfect underground disco track, only with a hit makers ear, art-punks ambition and studio slickness. 

While I’ve been talking about punk and post-punk and disco and hip-hop, I’ve been skirting around what I think first comes to mind whenever talking about the 1980s, the just incredible pop music of that era. 

Pop in the 80s was truly carnivorous, devouring all the influences of the punk scene and utilising the new technology, occasionally going so far as adopting something truly foreign, like the slew of intelligent pop that utilised the rhythms and beats of African music, or simply pioneering something new all on its own. 

Finally, some artists altered the underground world with their subdued songs of delicate pop and introverted world view. Bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, R.E.M, The Cure, The Smiths and The Feelies would take song-writing to a sensitive place usually reserved by singer-songwriters, but with a fuller rock sound. And while lyrics about social awkwardness and shyness weren't anything new, there’s something about the sound they created to surround those lyrics that was special. 

Indie, especially in these formative years, held no bile or angst, and restructured rock music from pushing a voice and an identity out, to an organised, collective sound. These bands were ethereal, jangly, mysterious and sometimes so modest as to make their lyrics inscrutable.