Title Fight #8: Greg! The Stop Sign!!!

More eye-catching song titles and ear-catching tunes today, starting with the gentleman above, who certainly knew a thing or two about writing an intriguing title. Any of these would do...

David Bowie - The Man Who Sold The World

David Bowie - Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed

David Bowie - Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family

David Bowie - Always Crashing in the Same Car

David Bowie - I'm Afraid of Americans

David Bowie - Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)

However, I'd argue that his best title is the one below... but maybe that's because I can't separate it in my head from the full album title.

Perhaps I've not got anything else that can compete with the Dame at full power... but I'm going to give it my best shot. Starting with this little beauty...

Firmament & The Elements - The Festival of Frothy Muggament

The driving force behind Firmament & The Elements was Bruce Woolley, one of the three men responsible for Video Killed The Radio Star (another great title). Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes released that song as The Buggles, while Bruce released his own version (with Thomas Dolby in keyboards). History is written by the victors.

Bruce Woolley & The Camera Club - Video Killed The Radio Star

The 1970s were a terribly sexist time, weren't they? I mean, this was the decade that brought us such enlightened thinking as...

The Monks - Nice Legs, Shame About the Face

Neil Young - A Man Needs a Maid

Joe Tex - Ain't Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)

Sailor - Girls, Girls, Girls

Thank heavens then for Andy Arthurs of bands like La Bouche, Tonight and The Rock Along Combo. He's clearly what they used to call a "new man". Although I'm not sure what he's doing in that raincoat...

A Raincoat - I Love You For Your Mind (Not Your Body) 

I used to work with a guy called Duncan Brown. He was an amateur weather man. As soon as he saw one snowflake in the sky, he'd start packing his bag and heading for the door. "I don't want to get stuck in that!" 

His namesake, with an added E, was a prominent figure in the English folk rock scene in the 70s. Sadly this Duncan died from cancer at only 46, but he left behind some great tunes, and one song title in particular that sticks in my mind...

Duncan Browne - Send Me The Bill For Your Friendship

I've had a few "friends" like that over the years...

This week's big discovery is from 1995, and the closest thing I can compare it to is Chumbawamba at their best. Although Chumbawamba take themselves seriously from time to time.

TISM (short for This Is Serious Mum) are a bunch of Australian alt-rock lunatics who wear balaclavas and a variety of outrageous costumes on stage and generally take the piss, with added nihilism. Band members include Humphrey B. Flaubert, Jock Cheese and Eugene de la Hot Croix Bun. TISM played their first gig in 1983 and broke up immediately afterwards. Every live performance since has been a reunion gig.  

All this will enrage those people of you believe there's no place for fun in popular music, but you're generally unhappy about everything anyway. Perhaps you'd be interested to learn that some pretentious goon in the Grauniad called Greg! The Stop Sign!! "a metaphor for our collective mortality". Or perhaps not...

Cnut Songs #24: End Times

"Your blog's changed over the past 12 months. It used to be more personal, more honest... a lot of woe-is-me whinging, yeah, but it felt like it was being written by an actual human being with hopes and fears, aspirations and... feelings. Lately though, it's just a bunch of lists linking to some cool tunes with feeble jokes and forced bonhomie."

Ironically, the latter is what I set out to create when I started My Top Ten (maybe with less feeble jokes and more genuine bonhomie). My old blog, Sunset Over Slawit, was very personal and open and honest... and I'd grown tired of sharing that side of myself with the world, so I devised MTT as purely a music list blog, because I thought that's all I wanted to write. Look back at the first couple of years of posts here, and that's all it is. Gradually though, the personal side took control again until MTT had basically become what SOS was 12 years ago... with arguably better tunes. 

So why have I gone full circle? If I'm being brutally honest, the answer is depression. There. I said it. Here's a track from the excellent Cherry Red compilation Revolt Into Style 1979 which sums it up better than any amount of my piffle can...

Andy Arthurs & The Rock Along Combo - I Feel Flat

"You're depressed? Join the fucking club, mate. If it's that bad, why don't you do something about it?"

What do you suggest? I went to the doctor about anxiety a couple of years back and all they did was put me on cognitive behavioural therapy. Via an app. I'm too cynical for CBT, you need a certain proclivity for tree-hugging, I believe... and on app? I understand that the NHS is at breaking point... I work in the NHS now!... so I know why I'm on an app rather than speaking to a real person... especially considering some of the people I work with who are on a waiting list for face-to-face CBT and have a much greater need than I ever will. There comes a point where you have to put your own "illness" into perspective and realise that it's mild enough to not bother the NHS with. Besides, if CBT is out... what am I left with?

Half Man Half Biscuit - Depressed Beyond Tablets

So what's getting me so down? Well, beyond bereavement and the ongoing mid-life crisis, The World itself is top of the list. I've posted a few excerpts from Dave Eggers' novel The Every recently, all of which paint a depressing picture of a world where technology has robbed us of freedom, individuality, creativity and joy. And then last week, this happened...

I've been teaching some lessons over the internet via Microsoft Teams again lately. Only the odd one, not like in Lockdown when all my lessons were online, but following my most recent lesson, I received a report from my "Speaker Coach". It seems that my lesson had been monitored by artificial intelligence, and the AI had a few tips for how I could improve my performance...

It's not all criticism though. Our robot gods have judged me worthy in certain ways...

I'm sorry, but this really is the End Times as far as I'm concerned. This comes in the same week as I heard about schoolkids using AI to do their homework, while a number of pioneers in the field warn that the end is nigh. In a rage, I shared my concerns with Ben...

Rol: End times.

Ben: Not really, just a reorientation of the labour process.

The spinning jenny, the combustion engine, even the printing press saw large modifications to labour.

This is now a quantification of the individual

Terrifying in it's direction, yes. But... "End times"? Only when the revolution comes, comrade!

I have a problem when technology interferes with art. Making a speech is on a similar level to art or music or writing. The fact that we now have AI attempting (and dictating how we should do) these things based on shitty algorithms... either human beings are really no longer needed, or we're just becoming so fucking lazy that our relevance is at an end. There's a distinction between replacing a boring and laborious mechanical process... and replacing creativity.

That's part of the restructuring of the labour process. Creativity was distinctly only an option for the ruling class until the 20th century and this will see to it going back to that

The de-skilling of labour through technology is something inherent to the capitalist mode of production, and it has found a way to penetrate the arts

And that really is the end times.

(You see now why I don't let Ben come round here as much as I used to? He's even more depressing than I am!)

We've reached a tipping point, and there's no going back from this. We've already got AI art generators, AI story and poetry generators, we've even got AI writing songs and recording new tunes from long defunct bands.  I used to tell myself that when I retired, I would start writing stories again... but really, what's the point? By then, the computers will be doing all that for us. It'll be terrible, but we'll have lost the critical faculties that enable us to tell the difference.

When I started writing blogs in 2006, the medium still felt relatively fresh and innovative. Blogs are old hat nowadays though, and most people who still write them are the wrong side of 40. But with an increasing amount of AI-generated content on the internet (and everywhere else), the weeds will soon choke out the flowers. 

And you wonder why I'm depressed... at least I can still rely on good, old-fashioned music to cheer me up.

7ebra are two sisters from Sweden, following in the steps of First Aid Kit, but with more of an Wet Leg vibe. As far as I can tell, they wrote all their own songs, play their own instruments, and use their own voices to sing with. In other words, no AI was used in the production of this wonderful tune...