tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/my-favourite-album-42870/articlesMy Favourite Album – The Conversation2018-03-23T03:35:50Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/845112018-03-23T03:35:50Z2018-03-23T03:35:50ZMy Favourite Album: Dead Letter Circus’s Aesthesis<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/205410/original/file-20180207-74506-nqgr2q.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Still from Dead Letter Circus's song While You Wait, from the album Aesthesis. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Youtube</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Music is a phenomenon like no other. It grabs you by the throat and tenaciously drags you into its clutches, shakes you up and down and never lets go.</p>
<p>The night after my first teaching gig at Deakin, in early 2015, my Dad died. He was a disciplined man and, having inherited those genes, after the most final of farewells at 4am, I began teaching again five hours later. I was filling out the week with another job, optimum caffeine intake and ascending blood pressure. </p>
<p>Many people inherit their parents’ taste in music before finding their own groove, and I did too, but I was also drawn to the music my kids liked and directed me towards. </p>
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<p>Australian band Karnivool was this piece of magic for me, this awakening: such risk-taking, such technique, crazy chord progressions, uncharted textures and those rhythms! Say what? </p>
<p>So I listened to more of producer Forrester Savell’s stable of artists. Savell is a product of the much-lauded Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) and knew the members of Karnivool, some of whom also studied there. He embraces the metal sound, as do I, loving the epic nature of it all, the richness, depth, the complexity of COG, The Butterfly Effect and Dead Letter Circus (DLC), all of whom he has also worked with. </p>
<p>DLC, a five-piece alternative rock band hailing from Brisbane, were wise enough to self-promote with such audacity that they built a strong fan base as they propelled themselves into the music fray. Their first album, This is the Warning, did not let aficionados down. </p>
<p>With my noble offspring I went to see the band perform at the Corner Hotel in Richmond in 2013, asking the girl at the door with the stamp if she wanted to see my ID. Not even a smirk. </p>
<p>I was not drawn to DLC’s second album, The Catalyst Fire, released later that year and hesitated in buying Aesthesis in August of that tumultuous year of 2015. Still, I gave it a spin, and then spun it again, and again. Despite reviewing new albums on a monthly basis, it’s still in the tray more often than not. </p>
<p>For a time there, it was the only thing getting me to and from work, to and from every obligation that my regulated mind cajoled me to meet, to and from one precarious moment to the next. Because that’s where this album dwells, on the edge of that sheer cliff of existence where a chromatic sun sets in the distance, while a small bluster of wind threatens to propel you into the abyss below. And, obviously, that’s where I was too. </p>
<p>It’s strange how very simple events can profoundly impact a disturbed mind, and so the simple irritant of tailgating experienced on the morning run to work assumed gargantuan proportions. </p>
<p>I would turn up the volume of Aesthesis and there was momentum and power in its incredible affective capacity, paradoxically dissipating my angst. We were as one. </p>
<p>DLC combines opening simplicity with a gradually complex layering of instruments, harmonies to die for and bass lines that compel you to earth. The steeply undulating melodies sung by Kim Benzie embrace a massive vocal range and with-my-last-breath intensity. They’re juxtaposed against fragile, vulnerable lyrics. </p>
<p>Born (Part 2) embodies this feel with its swirl of contradictions. </p>
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<p>I am folding within <br>
I am unfolding without <br>
Crumbling within <br>
I am exploding without … <br>
I must remember to forget</p>
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<p>The bond that builds with such an album cannot be unravelled. It’s akin to kin, those bloodlines, lifelong comrades, a faithful lapdog. There is still not a track on the album that I bypass and that’s rare even with the best of the best.</p>
<p>As a composer, I love to deconstruct sounds in order to better understand the thinking behind their architecture, and this album is bountiful in its musical rewards. Words often take a back seat as the sonic epiphanies engulf, warming one to the core. </p>
<p>But here the lyrics are pivotal to the package, from cynicism, “Build the wall higher, take no chances” from the song The Burning Number, to a trade-off between despair and hope as in my favourite track, Y A N A (an acronym for “You Are Not Alone”). A human-ravaged planet still manages succour:</p>
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<p>Keep setting fires <br>
Keep drinking water <br>
Breathe while you can <br>
This earth is your garden …</p>
<p>And it’s there for you <br>
Reaching out with aching arms <br>
And it’s in me <br>
Calling you home <br>
Calling you home.</p>
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<p>Armed with your fave music, indeed, You Are Not Alone.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84511/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mandy Stefanakis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Brisbane alternative rock musicians Dead Letter Circus make affective and powerful music, epitomised by their album Aesthesis.Mandy Stefanakis, Sessional lecturer in music education, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/852482017-12-06T03:13:57Z2017-12-06T03:13:57ZMy favourite album: Miles Davis’s A Tribute to Jack Johnson<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188899/original/file-20171005-21954-1i5opjg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Miles Davis circa 1970.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/winston_vargas/7854758654/in/photolist-cY6G6m-KyKFX-9NJybd-n1TaXZ-9NDrQR-9NGabs-9NEwpU-75e5GH-dP5QJa-bj8Q2a-4aCkYK-dyyNj2-bmKHiD-2hU2co-2hPwED-8hBGep-7ELZej-2hPwEX-n4ksm7-2hPwEM-9PeaUt-aRUPc8-2hPwEv-5wyX1u-7RWwYX-2hPwEi-2hU2cu-9Z7qXf-8WUqWk-48y2h6-8wownP-6G9QY4-6GAUxC-sCQnTS-niGeJF-6sgWBn-nqeh3n-2nEkS-d9EgY5-nGqW7x-myDFM4-8MneV3-nh5Yv3-KyLgH-9NGn6D-5bJrho-9NJTxs-nqegpi-6YB6yy-9NFVNX">Winston Vargas/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Great records do not necessarily arise out of historical ruptures. Nonetheless, Miles Davis’s A Tribute to Jack Johnson is significant in jazz and rock history if only for having the audacity to disrupt both so radically. It is perhaps Davis’s best album from an early 1970s period when he was tearing down the genre walls erected in audience’s minds.</p>
<p>The album was Davis’s second stab at a soundtrack, after <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051378/">Elevator to the Gallows</a> in 1958. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065906/">Jack Johnson</a> is a documentary about the first African-American boxer to become world heavyweight champion. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in 1971. The associated album, released the same year, passed largely unnoticed, not helped by Columbia Records putting the wrong image on the cover.</p>
<p>The squad Davis assembled for the Jack Johnson sessions reads, borrowing from Zen Marie’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/under-the-influence-of-miles-davis-electric-masterpieces-62084">apt analogy</a>, like the FC Barcelona of musical line-ups. They were: John McLaughlin (guitar); Herbie Hancock (keyboards); Steve Grossman (saxophone); Michael Henderson (bass); and Billy Cobham (drums). Due to producer Teo Macero’s cut-and-splice style, guitarist Sonny Sharrock and others also contributed.</p>
<p>In his 2004 book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95175.So_What">So What: The Life of Miles Davis</a>, biographer John Szwed notes how Davis began avoiding the term jazz as early as 1968, preferring to see his work simply as music. At the same time, he was becoming more interested in the sounds of the emerging counterculture. As well as incorporating non-Western and avant-classical aspects into his sound, Davis was coming under the influence of rock performers like Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and Sly Stone.</p>
<p>According to guitarist McLaughlin, Right Off, the first of two side-long tracks, began as an improvisation he set off while waiting around in the studio. Davis scampered out from the recording booth to join in at precisely 2:20. What resulted was 27 minutes of collective innovation that bulldozes over accepted jazz ideals of individual virtuosity.</p>
<p>Right Off is a strutting, swaying, jabbing piece – an electrified melange of blues, funk and soul. Uninhibited by limitations of genre, here Davis and his crew were blazing a trail way in advance of the clotted radicalism of much jazz and rock.</p>
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<p>Yesternow – side two of the original LP – is different; a pensive, near-ambient soundscape. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called Yesternow “<a href="https://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?id=944&name=Miles+Davis">mood music for a vacation on the moon</a>”, which neatly captures its exotic drift.</p>
<p>In the liner notes to his 1982 record On Land (another perennial favourite in this house), Brian Eno praises the “spacious quality” of He Loved Him Madly, Davis’s 1974 elegy to Duke Ellington. A wobbly line can be drawn from 1969’s In A Silent Way through Yesternow to He Loved Him Madly, and the influence of these revolutionary works upon Eno and myriad other unconventional artists is palpable.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://milestones-a-miles-davis-archive.tumblr.com/post/142405763483/milesdavis-jack-johnson-original-soundtrack-aka">notes</a> Davis penned for Jack Johnson hint at his own growing sense of marginalisation: “And of course being born Black in America … we all know how that goes.” With Richard Nixon in the White House, Vietnam in meltdown and the Kent and Jackson State massacres fresh in the mind, these were troubled times in America. Davis himself was lucky not to be seriously hurt in a drive-by shooting, which ended in his being arrested.</p>
<p>This record likewise sits at the margins. Today, most critics continue to couch their favoured styles – jazz, rock, folk, classical – in sentimental terms, invoking static rather than evolving forms. Jack Johnson, too rock-inflected for jazz, too jazz-like for rock, sails far beyond such closed narratives.</p>
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<p>The significance of Davis to the jazz tradition culminates around the time of his 1959 album Kind of Blue. In recent years, conservative commentators, of whom fellow trumpeter Wynton Marsalis is the most prominent, have attempted to erase iconoclasts like Davis and Ornette Coleman <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/jan/25/artsfeatures.popandrock">from that genre’s later history</a>. For the average jazz purist, Jack Johnson is merely further proof that Davis sold out to rock.</p>
<p>Yet rock’s dominant Anglo-American canon is just as reductive as its jazz counterpart. For instance, in his recent book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26792278-1971---never-a-dull-moment">1971: Never a Dull Moment</a> (subtitled Rock’s Golden Year), David Hepworth somehow excludes Jack Johnson from a list of 100 albums that supposedly confirm 1971 as “the annus mirabilis of rock music”. Absurdly, rock critics <a href="https://www.discogs.com/lists/500-Greatest-Albums-Rolling-Stone/140759">have adopted Kind of Blue</a> into their mainstream canon while ignoring the likes of Jack Johnson.</p>
<p>In truth, selecting a single “favourite” album from the colossal ocean of recorded music now available can seem perversely limiting. On another day I might have chosen PJ Harvey’s Stories of the City, Stories of the Sea, Laurie Anderson’s United States Live, Triosk’s Headlight Serenade, Dead C’s Future Artists, Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps, The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, The Anthology of American Folk Music, or any one of dozens of other contenders.</p>
<p>But perhaps Jack Johnson is an apt choice: an album that reminds how we occupy a fluid, ever-evolving sound world, where favourites already heard compete with others still to be discovered. Or, as Davis himself <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Lfcs1KBbypAC&pg=PA260&lpg=PA260&dq=%22they%27ll+be+messed+up+on+that+bogus+nostalgia+thing%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=7juYTEjN-h&sig=b4HDTEICbfzQCUE-HRcKB0Uyl84&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiL56WtqvTXAhUBwrwKHSQcD1oQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=%22they'll%20be%20messed%20up%20on%20that%20bogus%20nostalgia%20thing%E2%80%9D&f=false">warned</a>: “They’ll be messed up on that bogus nostalgia thing.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85248/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dean Biron does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Miles Davis’s 1971 album A Tribute to Jack Johnson sits uneasily within both jazz and rock genres, but its indefinable nature should be celebrated.Dean Biron, PhD in Cultural Studies; teaches in criminology and justice studies, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/840472017-09-24T20:02:53Z2017-09-24T20:02:53ZMy favourite album: David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186699/original/file-20170920-22604-m72ffj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">David Bowie performs on his 1974 Diamond Dogs world tour. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/hdport/3329403108">Hunter Desportes/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Diamond Dogs, David Bowie’s eighth studio album released in 1974, was the first Bowie album I heard. I had just turned 13. </p>
<p>The album represents Bowie’s attempt to create his own post-apocalyptic soundscape after the George Orwell estate refused him the rights to 1984 for a <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/david-bowies-failed-george-orwell-1984-adaptation-w489470">TV musical</a>. However, Bowie references Orwell through songs like Big Brother, We Are the Dead and, of course, 1984: </p>
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<p>They’ll split your pretty cranium, and fill it full of air, and tell you that you’re 80, but brother, you won’t care, you’ll be shooting up on anything, tomorrow’s never there.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But despite its dystopian themes there is something wonderfully hopeful about Diamond Dogs. The album followed Aladdin Sane (1973) and Ziggy Stardust (1972), the latter having established Bowie as a star(man), come to deliver us from the emptiness, the dreariness, the heteronormative fetters of English suburban life. Like these albums, only more so, Diamond Dogs homed in on that other-worldly quality that Bowie seemed both to embody and so sublimely express.</p>
<p>As was typical of Bowie, sound was preceded by vision. On Diamond Dogs, the extraterrestrial messiah that was Ziggy is gone and we encounter Bowie as half-man, half-dog. Perhaps more preternatural than supernatural (though in European times past the dog symbolised the devil), the image is arresting. Yet, in Bowie’s hands, somehow urgent, necessary. Through the image he appears to embrace hybridity, difference, to move beyond our limited conception of what it means to be human. </p>
<p>And how he delighted in it! He did ambiguity with such certainty and style that it no longer seemed adequate to be “normal”, which was fine and dandy with me. Bowie carved out a space for us freaks and it was both overwhelming and delicious.</p>
<p>As a young trans person, long before “trans” had any real cultural currency, that is, before I could name myself, listening to Diamond Dogs changed everything. Like Bowie, I’d “found a door which let’s me out” (When You Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me). At first, I was semantically shocked (“something kind of hit me today” – We Are the Dead), then undone. It was simultaneously: recognition, connection and hope, that moment when we sense something more, something different, something richer.</p>
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<p>Musically, the album creates a tension between dark and light, sinister, yet seductive. Positioned somewhere between glam rock (or in Bowie’s case art rock), soul/funk and the soon-to-arrive punk, Diamond Dogs is a transitional album. Bowie was always on the move.</p>
<p>It’s not an album for purists or genre-junkies, but that was never Bowie’s shtick. Rather, Diamond Dogs is an assemblage of styles, a montage. It is symphony and cacophony. It opens with spoken word accompanied by synths (Future Legend), pays homage to the Stones (Diamond Dogs), and closes with the hypnotic Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family. In betwixt, we move from Frank Sinatra-like crooning to German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. When you listen to Diamond Dogs, it ain’t just your mother who’s in a whirl.</p>
<p>The best part of Diamond Dogs, and arguably the greatest piece of music Bowie ever produced, is the nine-minute triptych that lies in the middle of side one: Sweet Thing, Candidate, Sweet Thing (Reprise). These songs are highly emotional. They trade in vulnerability and longing, but they also transport and delight. This is Bowie at his best, accompanied by Mike Garson’s sublime piano. “If you want it, boys, get it here, thing.”</p>
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<p>Diamond Dogs creates a sense of vertigo, an out-of-kilter state through which we gain access to something sacred. Vocally, Bowie sweeps from a deep register to a soaring falsetto. </p>
<p>The album is lyrically opaque. In the past Bowie had relied on his own dreams, a practice that was both instinctive (think Hunky Dory 1971) and consolidated by his familiarity with the writings of psychoanalyst Carl Jung (see Memory, Dreams, Reflections 1965). Diamond Dogs marked a shift in Bowie’s approach to writing. From here on in he would adopt the cut-up technique (where a previous text is rearranged) popularised by William Burroughs. </p>
<p>Bowie is the tasteful thief and the studied faker, laughing at the hubris of the hippies and the prog rockers, at their illusions of “authenticity”. Yet, while preferring surface to depth, he captures a deeper embodied truth, one we feel riff after riff. It just feels so right. The fragmentation of his music and his lyrics are us. They point both to the multiplicity of who we are and who we might become. They call us to move beyond ourselves, our received identities. This is especially so in relation to gender and sexuality, themes that loom large on the album. </p>
<p>For me, Diamond Dogs was a mirror experience. Listening to it today, “I’m in tears again” (When You Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me).</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84047/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alex Sharpe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>David Bowie was the tasteful thief and practised faker, and his 1974 album Diamond Dogs borrowed from everything to create a sublime post-apocalyptic soundscape.Alex Sharpe, Professor of Law, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/794322017-09-20T02:05:58Z2017-09-20T02:05:58ZMy favourite album: Hole’s Live Through This<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184159/original/file-20170831-22574-pymwc9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> </figcaption></figure><p>For someone who spent her youth living in small towns in regional Australia, Hole were the accessible end of the early 90s feminist moment in rock music (along with L7). And by “accessible”, I mean not sonically, but as something I could access at all. I could read about Bikini Kill in the music magazines at the local newsagents but actually finding their music to listen to was a lot harder. </p>
<p>Hole, and Courtney Love, I already knew, from their earlier album <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL0W4E0yR_s">Pretty on the Inside</a>. Live Through This came out in 1994, and was on the one hand, a raw, angry, feminist-inspired, riffy, grunge noise, but on the other, well-produced enough, and with enough hooks and memorable tunes, to stand out from the crowd and get stuck in your head. </p>
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<p>The elephant that’s always in the room with this album is the circumstances of its release. It remains almost impossible to disentangle Love’s entire career from her association with Kurt Cobain. </p>
<p>By attaching herself to rock’s man of the moment, having a child with him, and then steadfastly continuing to refuse to behave, Love became the new Yoko Ono, reviled by fans, critics and Dave Grohl alike. Every uniquely gendered insult that could be thought of was directed her way – starfucker, golddigger, he probably writes her songs for her, it’s her fault he’s addicted, and most damningly BAD MOTHER.</p>
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<span class="caption">Courtney Love, Frances Bean and Kurt Cobain in September 1992.</span>
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<p>The surprise of Live Through This was its overwhelmingly positive reception in the face of tragedy. Cobain killed himself a week before the album was due to come out. It turned out to be a perfect soundtrack for the grief and disbelief of the Gen X-ers who had just lost their hero.</p>
<p>From the lyrics - which could only be read as rejected attempts to reach out to someone struggling to survive the effects of celebrity – (from Doll Parts: “yeah they really want you, but I do too”) to the title to the perfect way the rage permeating the album intersected with Love’s surprisingly well-received performance of the rock widow, even now it is difficult to disassociate Live Through This from Cobain’s death.</p>
<p>In many ways though, this is unfair. Live Through This is an album I come back to because it is full of well-crafted and super-catchy but angry, biting, songs that – and this is important – I can shout along with when the mood takes me (or, let’s be honest, at karaoke). </p>
<p>Many of the songs on Live Through This show absolute mastery of the grunge “soft-loud-soft” dynamic that was so effective for many of the genres’ best known bands, particularly the opening pair of tracks <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH_rfGBwamc">Violet</a> and Miss World. </p>
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<p>The lyrics throughout deal unapologetically with women’s issues, from rape (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2NZhXoEu6o">Asking for It</a>) to motherhood (Plump), even through to Love’s critique of the Riot Grrrl movement in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4vs2drW_Hc">Olympia</a>. Many of the songs are about relationships with other women, including difficult ones, rather than love songs about men.</p>
<p>Courtney was by no means the first woman to create women-centric music, but she was one of the first I came across (small country towns, remember?) That I later tried to start a band was in part thanks to not just Love’s role modelling on Live Through This, but bass player Kirsten Pfaff and drummer Patty Schemel’s. (That I was terrible at it was entirely down to me.) </p>
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<p>It is such a good album that I feel confident in saying it would be regarded as a classic even if Cobain was currently trying to make a come-back with a reformed Nirvana after years of dodgy, experimental solo projects.</p>
<p>But as much as judging art purely on its own merits sounds like a nice (if unobtainable) ideal, and as nice as it would be to find a way to assess Hole without having to refer to a man who wasn’t in the band, an appreciation of Live Through This is in some ways enhanced by knowing what the band was up against to create the album.</p>
<p>Love was a woman who not only did the things she wasn’t supposed to do, but kept doing them in the face of whatever fate or other people would throw her way. To say she has always done this with grace and in sensible ways would be lying. But despite everything, she is still a feminist icon to me. </p>
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<p>There is still something inspirational in a scrappy, messy, sometimes self-destructive diva who is visibly ageing but also really visibly trying not to age. Because who among us isn’t sometimes a mess, and who can claim they really aren’t just a bit self-conscious about their growing wrinkles? (Especially after being presented with the flawless visages of Beyonce or Gal Gadot as our current crop of feminist icons.)</p>
<p>Hole might not have lived up to the expectations placed on them, but Live Through This still speaks of potential - particularly feminine potential - being unlocked in new and exciting ways.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79432/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Strong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Kurt Cobain killed himself a week before this album was due to come out. It became a perfect soundtrack to Gen X’s grief and with its raw, angry, feminist-inspired, grunge sound, remains a classic.Catherine Strong, Senior Lecturer, Music Industry, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/837862017-09-15T04:26:48Z2017-09-15T04:26:48ZMy favourite album: readers’ choice<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186146/original/file-20170915-16273-1tj7il0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Beyoncé in the music video for Sorry, from Lemonade. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screenshot from Youtube</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>This week we’ve been asking our authors to name their favourite albums. We’ve heard about <a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-album-kate-bushs-hounds-of-love-79899">Kate Bush</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-album-the-cures-kiss-me-kiss-me-kiss-me-82913">The Cure</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-album-the-beastie-boys-ill-communication-81104">The Beastie Boys</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-album-yothu-yindis-tribal-voice-83643">Yothu Yindi</a>, and <a href="http://theconversation.com/my-favourite-album-pulps-different-class-81395">Pulp</a>. I listened to these. Despite all being from a time before my sixth birthday I was pleasantly surprised. They’re not Beyoncé, but decent all the same. </p>
<p>Now it’s over to you. Many of you couldn’t choose one and protested that choosing a favourite album is an impossible task. </p>
<p>By numbers Pink Floyd is undoubtedly your favourite artist, with Dark Side of the Moon coming out on top. Readers called it “technically perfect” and “ageless”. You also liked four other Pink Floyd albums. </p>
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<p>Other albums to make multiple appearances were Radiohead’s Ok Computer, The Beatle’s Sgt Pepper’s (which celebrated <a href="https://theconversation.com/sgt-peppers-at-50-the-greatest-thing-you-ever-heard-or-just-another-album-77458">50 years in June</a>), Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and Patti Smith’s Horses. Leonard Cohen, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones were all strongly represented. A lot of you love soundtracks, from A Single Man to Morning of the Earth to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. </p>
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<p>Many of you wrote in with lovely stories of your encounters with cherished albums. </p>
<p>Emily Piggott told us about her life-changing discovery of the The Smiths’ Meat is Murder: </p>
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<p>I first heard it at about age 16 and became vegetarian (at age 17). I am 42 and still vegetarian. Thanks Morrissey. Some of the sounds on that album still make me really teary (the rain in Well I Wonder). The absolute simplicity and honesty of sadness and loss in this album is really profound for me. I know that others see this album as over done, over blown, full of terrible Morrissey angst, but I still see it as an incredible example of the beauty of sadness. </p>
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<p>Helen Garner named Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks:</p>
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<p>I always expect it to have been worn out by my memory of it; but every time I listen to it, its freshness and daring astonish me.</p>
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<p>Ian King nominated Rush’s Moving Pictures: </p>
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<p>Holding this vinyl LP in a dreary Thatcherite England was the same as holding hope, joy, fun and aspiration. Even the cover artwork was a mix of wit, rooted ideas and magic.</p>
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<p>Vivienne Forde continued the love for Kate Bush in general, and A Woman’s Work in particular:</p>
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<p>A hundred words, two thousand would not do, three million hmmmm, she is eternal, her sound is pure love. Could I choose an album, hardly, it would be some kind of sacrilege. I fell in love with sounds I heard over the airwaves on Cork radios in Ireland in March 1978, I had just turned 13. I saw her on The Late Late Show, I was mesmerized. She had touched me, I was hers forever.</p>
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<p>Chris Panagiataros wrote of the power of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: </p>
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<p>… an ode to hip hop, the perfect blend of controversy, advocacy, poetry and self-reflection. I and I’m sure many millennials across the world have fought the battle for hip hop, defending lyrics and the genre when we heard the remark, “hip hop isn’t music”. From the Bronx to the Australia hip hop scene, it has become our outlet for expression.</p>
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<p>And Tammy Unkovich wrote of a life lived with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ No More Shall We Part: </p>
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<p>This album soothes and exhilarates. It’s always in my car. It’s my desert island disc. St Nick’s lyric mastery drips like honey through the speakers. These unassuming ballads are unleashed like wild animals in the live domain. “God is in the House” and “Oh My Lord” revel in Warren’s moaning violin; “Hallelujah” is riveting and “My Sorrowful Wife” lends itself to yesteryear yet rips your heart open in the outro. This is the year I met my husband to be; the year we bonded over this masterpiece; the year we saw the band live at Metro Perth in an earth-shattering experience. When an adjective is needed or precise phrasing is preferred, St Nick melts my heart and English language sensibilities. This album is flawless!!</p>
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<p>There were so many others: The Triffids, Black Swan; The Weeping Willows, Before Darkness Comes A-Callin’; Green Day, American Idiot; Yani, Live at the Acropolis; Jeff Buckley, Grace; The Talking Heads, Remain in Light; Lou Reed, Transformer; The Clash, Sandanista!; PJ Harvey, Let England Shake; Bob Evans, Car Boot Sale; Deborah Conway, String of Pearls; and Missy Higgins, The Sound of White. </p>
<p>I asked around our office too. Guns and Roses’ Appetite for Destruction. The Thermals’ The Body, The Blood, The Machine. Carly Rae Jepsen’s E.mo.tion (I endorse this heartily). Taylor Swift’s 1989. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (that’s our CEO). Radiohead’s Ok Computer. Smashing Pumpkin’s Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Ott’s Skylon. Calexico and Iron & Wine’s In the Rein. Yves Klein Blue’s Ragged and Ecstatic. The Best of Richard Clayderman. </p>
<p>Some of you rejected the whole notion of contemporary music:</p>
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<p>Just about ALL of it should be trashed. Ghastly noise largely performed by people who cannot SING A NOTE!</p>
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<p>For you I highly recommend our fabulous series on classical music, <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-37147">Decoding the Music Masterpieces</a>. </p>
<p>Finally my own favourite album. It is of course the greatest album from the greatest singer, Beyoncé’s Lemonade. </p>
<p><img width="100%" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/l3V0doGbp2EDaLHJC/giphy.gif"></p>
<p>Thank you for your wonderful submissions and passionate opinions. </p>
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<p><em>Are you a music or culture academic who would like contribute to this series? Please contact <a href="mailto:james.whitmore@theconversation.edu.au">James Whitmore</a> or Suzy Freeman-Greene</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83786/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
From The Smiths to Kendrick Lamar, Conversation readers tell us their favourite albums.James Whitmore, Deputy Editor: Arts + Culture, The ConversationLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/813952017-09-15T02:03:59Z2017-09-15T02:03:59ZMy favourite album: Pulp’s Different Class<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184324/original/file-20170901-26017-m21e3d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jarvis Cocker in the film clip for Common People. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screenshot from Youtube</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The album is an artistic statement, a swag of songs greater than the sum of its parts. In this series, our authors nominate their favourites.</em></p>
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<p>For many, the explosion of Britpop on the global music scene in the 1990s was a bright counterargument to the grunge sound emerging from the US at the time. It was the musical contribution to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Britannia">Cool Britannia</a> revitalisation of British creativity, later co-opted for jingoistic purposes by New Labour. </p>
<p>The 2003 documentary <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0358569/">Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Britpop</a> is rather preoccupied with the famous feud between Britpop powerhouses Blur and Oasis. The film characterises this as something of a class war between middle-class Blur and working-class Oasis. But no band better captured the real tensions between class and youth in the time of Cool Britannia than Pulp and its 1995 album Different Class.</p>
<p>My first taste of the album was what is now recognised as Pulp’s greatest single, Common People. It has a catchy pop hook, no doubt, but I was drawn in by Jarvis Cocker’s sardonic storytelling. I wanted more and as soon as I had enough pocket money saved, Different Class became the second album I ever bought. It remains my most listened to. </p>
<p>Regularly listed among the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140201180055/http://www.1001beforeyoudie.com/1001_albums_uk.html">greatest albums</a> <a href="http://www.nme.com/photos/the-500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-100-1-1426116">of all time</a> it combines clever pop musical styling with honest lyrics about fumblings, infidelities, and music festivals (such as their controversial single, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6lXpk0vkEU">Sorted for E’s and Whizz</a>). Above all, it’s an album full of stories from everyday people living their everyday lives. </p>
<p>Pulp was first conceived by a teenage Cocker and his friend, Peter Dalton, in 1978, with other members joining over the years.
In his introduction to <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12764721-mother-brother-lover">Mother, Brother, Lover</a>, a published collection of his lyrics, Cocker describes his blueprint for songwriting as “an attempt to marry ‘inappropriate’ subject matter to fairly conventional ‘pop’ song structures.” </p>
<p>This blueprint is undoubtedly the formula for success in Different Class. Punters could see themselves in lyrics that evoked the hazy smoke lingering around the pool table at the pub (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTMWgOduFM">Common People</a>), or the exhausted collapse at a café table after a night out (Bar Italia). These weren’t things you were supposed to sing about, but Pulp did. </p>
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<p>Pulp still trod some of the well-worn territory of pop music - love and sex - but the romantic soft focus was removed from the lens. Owen Hatherley, author of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11281898-uncommon">Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp</a>, observes with a shudder that Pulp write songs about sex that focus on “embarrassment, mess, and clothes”. </p>
<p>There is still room on Different Class for the astonishment of unexpectedly falling in love in a song like <a href="https://youtu.be/EFSdf_VeYG0">Something Changed</a>. In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qxn7DLcNwQ">F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E</a>. they remind us that every day love “isn’t chocolate boxes and roses – it’s dirtier than that, like some small animal that only comes out at night.” The band explores the awkwardness of first sexual encounters in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfte0NVxUQE">Underwear</a> and the torture of unrequited love in <a href="https://youtu.be/qJS3xnD7Mus">Disco 2000</a>.</p>
<p>The most prominent theme of Different Class is, of course, class itself. It’s the kind of gritty subject matter usually left to earnest rockers like Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen rather than bands breaking on to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139803/">Top of the Pops</a>. But Pulp got fans singing and dancing to searing commentaries on class and privilege. The album opens explosively with <a href="https://youtu.be/S0DRch3YLh0">Mis-shapes</a>, a call to arms for working class youth to reclaim a society after the years of Thatcherism. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Raised on a diet of broken biscuits, oh we don’t look the same as you, we don’t do the things you do, but we live round here too … Brothers, sisters, can’t you see? The future’s owned by you and me.</p>
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<p>The class warfare finds a more intimate outlet in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VMkg8AlFZo">Pencil Skirt</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMQi0pZY_J8">I Spy</a> as the lyrics explore the transgressive potential of sexual relationships between the classes. Both songs are tales of “a bit of rough” undermining the middle classes with adventures in tawdry sex and infidelity with posh birds. The lover who laments with bittersweet regret that class difference is exactly what gives an embrace such frisson in Pencil Skirt transforms into a sinister class terrorist crowing with delight over a cuckolded toff in the Leonard Cohen-esque I Spy. The sweet revenge promised in Mis-shapes comes to fruition.</p>
<p>It was <a href="https://youtu.be/yuTMWgOduFM">Common People</a> that presented the most honest and accurate discussion of class as an inescapable phenomenon for those without the means and privilege to pretend otherwise. Based upon an actual encounter Cocker had with a young woman while studying at Central St Martins in London in the late 1980s, the song mocks her misguided class tourism. She could slum it with common lovers and a cheap apartment but class – real socio-economic disadvantage – is something inescapable:</p>
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<p>You’ll never fail like common people, you’ll never watch your life slide out of view, and dance, and drink, and screw because there’s nothing else to do.</p>
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<p>The irony, of course, is that the song launched Pulp into celebrity and with that comes a form of privilege. It did not, however, sit well with the band. Seven years and another two albums later, Pulp undertook a nine-year hiatus, returning only for a reunion tour, not to produce new material. </p>
<p>While Cocker’s cocaine addiction is easily presented as more attention-grabbing evidence of decline (as was the famous bottom-waggling incident at Michael Jackson’s performance at the 1996 BRIT Awards), guitarist Mark Webber’s habit of playing with his back to the audience was most revealing as to how uncomfortable the band were with their level of celebrity. </p>
<p>Their discomfort with the tawdriness of fame and fortune found its outlet in their next album <a href="https://youtu.be/JXbLyi5wgeg">This Is Hardcore</a>. If we see Different Class as the working class ingénue moving to a flat in the city with some mates to try make it as a model or actress, This Is Hardcore finds her a few years later making pornos just to pay the rent.</p>
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<p><em>Are you a music or culture academic who would like contribute to this series? Please contact <a href="mailto:james.whitmore@theconversation.edu.au">James Whitmore</a> or Suzy Freeman-Greene</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81395/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jess Carniel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In Different Class, Pulp got fans singing and dancing to searing commentaries on class and privilege.Jess Carniel, Lecturer in Humanities, University of Southern QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/836432017-09-14T02:21:21Z2017-09-14T02:21:21ZMy favourite album: Yothu Yindi’s Tribal Voice<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185588/original/file-20170912-6178-1je7f7t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Yothu Yindi performing in 2000. Their songs offered hope and strength to generations of Yolŋu people. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dean Lewins/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Music is central to my training and career as a musician and (ethno)musicologist. I’ve studied music of one kind or another since the age of four, and so I have many favourite albums and artists. But one special album - Tribal Voice - has shaped me so much more than any other, and set the course of my life and work.</p>
<p>It was the brainchild of Yothu Yindi, a band with roots in the former Methodist mission town of Yirrkala on the Gove Peninsula in northeast Arnhem Land. This is a remote part of Australia with an Indigenous majority population that comprises the traditional homelands of the Yolŋu people. </p>
<p>Formed in 1986, Yothu Yindi brought together three Yolŋu musicians from Yirrkala whose upbringings had been steeped in traditional culture - the late M Yunupiŋu, Wi<u>t</u>iyana Marika, and the late M Munuŋgurr - with three “Balanda” musicians whom they’d befriended in Darwin - Stu Kellaway, Cal Williams, and Andy Beletty. The band’s debut album, <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/au/album/homeland-movement/id586482501">Homeland Movement</a> (1989), opened with four original songs. What ensued, however, had never been heard on a rock album before. </p>
<p>The following nine tracks were drawn from song series of the Manikay tradition, the sacred songs performed by the Yolŋu at public ceremonies. Different sets of these Manikay items belonged to the Gumatj and Rirratjiŋu clans, of which Yunupiŋu and Marika were respective members. They stand as sacred expressions of their unbroken lineages from the original ancestors who named, shaped and populated the Yolŋu homelands, bestowing ownership of these myriad countries upon people of their descent. </p>
<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/au/album/tribal-voice/id586510491">Tribal Voice</a>, the band’s second album of 1991, showed a much more blended approach, and produced two hit songs through remixes of Treaty and Djäpana: Sunset Dreaming (released on an extended edition of the album in 1992). This album interspersed Manikay items of the Rirratjiŋu clan, Dhum’thum (Agile Wallaby) and Yinydjapana (Dolphin), with originals sung in both English and Yolŋu-Matha. Many of these originals were influenced by themes, lyrics and direct musical quotations drawn from the Manikay series of the Gumatj clan.</p>
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<p>Both <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqkHCMdBSb4">My Kind of Life</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlLV4DXz9A0">Hope</a> reference native honey, which is both a source of nourishment and a symbol of knowledge in Yolŋu tradition. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73knlgKgFHg">Maralitja: Crocodile Man</a> establishes the Gumatj clan’s descent from <em>Maralitja</em>, the Saltwater Crocodile ancestor, while Dharpa (Tree) sings of the law given to the Gumatj by the ghost ancestor, <em>Ganbulapula</em>, for hunting Red Kangaroo. </p>
<p>Mätjala (Driftwood) celebrates the importance of the traditional <i>yothu–yindi</i> (child–mother) relationship between the Rirratjiŋu and Gumatj clans, and Yunupiŋu sings of his own late father and mother, as personified by the <em>Gapirri</em> (Stingray) and <em>Baywara</em> (Olive Python) ancestors in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LRw3YCQ9sQ">Gapirri</a> (Stingray).</p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onxDje3pwVI">Mainstream</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0I6oE98r4M">Djäpana: Sunset Dreaming</a> were both influenced by Yunupiŋu’s work as an educator of Yolŋu schoolchildren during the 1980s. Mainstream stems from Yunupiŋu’s views on the rights of Yolŋu to be educated biculturally in both English and Yolŋu-Matha, and sets forth his vision for an Australia in which Yolŋu and Balanda can live and work together in harmony and mutual respect.</p>
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<p>His ideas were inspired by the traditional concept of <em>Ga<u>n</u>ma</em> (Converging Currents). This comes from a river site on the Gumatj homeland of Biranybirany where saltwater and freshwater currents meet, and produce a yellow foam on the water’s surface. The foam is referenced in the song’s first verse. Djäpana: Sunset Dreaming, the first song composed by Yunupiŋu in 1982, quotes the Manikay subject of <em>Djäpana</em> (Coral Sunset), which is associated with sorrow and woe. </p>
<p>Together, these songs offered hope and strength to generations of Yolŋu people who had been raised under the shadow of a bauxite mine on the Gove Peninsula. They offered audiences elsewhere a rare insight into the resolve and aspirations of an Australian Indigenous people.</p>
<p>Parents of the band’s Yolŋu members had been central to fighting a case opposing the Gove Peninsula mine in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory. Ultimately, it failed in 1971 to recognise the continuing sovereignty of the Yolŋu people over their own homelands. The involvement of Yunupiŋu’s brother, Galarrwuy, in attempting to rectify this injustice by calling on the Australian Government to make a treaty with Indigenous peoples of the NT during the 1988 Bicentenary was immortalised in the song, Treaty. The bravery of these acts, perhaps more than anything else, is what inspired me to devote much of my career to working with Yolŋu music and musicians. </p>
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<span class="caption">Yothu Yindi performs Treaty during the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.</span>
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<p>The music video for Treaty includes news footage of then Prime Minister Bob Hawke attending the 1988 Barunga Festival, and shows the preparation of the Barunga Statement, the document that called upon the Australian Government for a treaty.</p>
<p>Treaty also quotes a song drawn from Yolŋu history. It is not, however, a Manikay item, but rather an original song in the playful and exuberant Dja<u>t</u>paŋarri style, which was popular as a form of entertainment among young men at Yirrkala from the 1930s and 1970s. Its incorporation into Treaty informs the melodic structure of this song. Yothu Yindi dedicated Tribal Voice to three past Gumatj masters of the Dja<u>t</u>paŋarri style, and framed the entire album with two historical Dja<u>t</u>paŋarri songs, Gapu (Water) and Biyarrmak (Comic).</p>
<p>My favourite song from this album, however, is its title track, Tribal Voice: a rousing call to action. It links the plight of the Yolŋu to that of peoples all over the world who are fighting for the survival of their traditions. With repeated calls to “Get up, stand up”, it viscerally captures the ethos of resistance against oppression originally proclaimed by the Wailers in Jamaica in 1973. </p>
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<p>The music video for Tribal Voice is equally as powerful. The band dances amid a grove of sacred cycad palms in ceremonial dress before they are then seen touring the world against iconic landmarks including the Colosseum and the Statue of Liberty. Yunupiŋu sings surrounded by sacred Gumatj flames, and then in the cycad palm grove, his arms outstretched in Saltwater Crocodile stance.</p>
<p>The action soon moves to a gathering where Yunupiŋu’s brother, Galarrwuy, sings Manikay over two reclining boys being painted in readiness for initiation, which the Yolŋu traditionally perform as a <i>garma</i> (public) ceremony attended by men, women, and children. During the same scene, Yunupiŋu holds a ceremonial woven basket in his mouth and dances Stingray to express the tremendous power of ancestral law.</p>
<p>The song concludes in a crescendo of its repeated hook line, “You’d better listen to your tribal voice”, as Yunupiŋu shouts out the names of his and related Yolŋu clans: Gumatj, Rirratjiŋu, Wangurri, Djapu’, Dha<u>l</u>waŋu, <u>D</u>ä<u>t</u>iwuy, Maŋgalili, and Gälpu.</p>
<p>Tribal Voice is a <i>tour de force</i>. It set forth a vision for an Australia in which Indigenous peoples can live in harmony and mutual respect with their fellow citizens, while continuing to practice sacred laws and care for country in their traditions of their ancestors. </p>
<p>Over the past 25 years, it has influenced the topics that I’ve chosen to research, the career I’ve chosen to pursue, the friendships I’ve made, and the places to which I’ve travelled in ways that were inconceivable to me before. It has been a catalyst in my life, and in the lives of my close family and friends, which has transformed our worldviews and our understandings of what it is to be an Australian. </p>
<p>I will be forever grateful to the many Yolŋu musicians, including Wi<u>t</u>iyana Marika and the late M Yunupiŋu, who have collaborated with me so generously over many years and whose families have been so welcoming.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83643/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aaron Corn receives funding from the Australian Research Council. His book on Yothu Yindi is available for purchase from Sydney University Press: <a href="http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/sup/9781920899349">http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/sup/9781920899349</a>. </span></em></p>The songs of Tribal Voice offered hope and strength to generations of Yolŋu people and gave audiences elsewhere a rare insight into the resolve and aspirations of Indigenous Australia.Aaron Corn, Professor of Music and Director, Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music (CASM) and National Centre for Aboriginal Language and Music Studies (NCALMS), University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/811042017-09-13T04:18:13Z2017-09-13T04:18:13ZMy favourite album: The Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184311/original/file-20170901-22435-8p6g6g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Beastie Boys in the music video for Sure Shot. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screenshot from Youtube</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The album is an artistic statement, a swag of songs greater than the sum of its parts. In this series, our authors nominate their favourites.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>It was 1994, and the period known as the Golden Age of mainstream hip-hop (from the late ’80s to early ’90s) was coming to an end. Lawsuits had begun to cripple sampling culture. The seams of the rap industry were starting to stretch, as territorial feuds simmered between the East Coast’s Notorious B.I.G and West Coast’s Tupac. As the curtain closed on one of hip-hop’s most storied eras, the Beastie Boys released their fourth studio album, Ill Communication.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184299/original/file-20170901-21670-bz7t57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184299/original/file-20170901-21670-bz7t57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184299/original/file-20170901-21670-bz7t57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184299/original/file-20170901-21670-bz7t57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184299/original/file-20170901-21670-bz7t57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184299/original/file-20170901-21670-bz7t57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184299/original/file-20170901-21670-bz7t57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184299/original/file-20170901-21670-bz7t57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Beastie Boys Ill Communication.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
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<p>Previously ridiculed for their abrasive and monochromatic rhymes referencing partying, alcohol, girls and basketball, the Beastie Boys had a growing reputation by 1994. The release of Ill Communication challenged the band’s most diehard of critics, presenting arguably one of the most mature and transformative albums of the decade. </p>
<p>The album itself is a kaleidoscope of jazz-infused break-beats (where Herbie Hancock meets the Chemical Brothers), smooth instrumentals, bratty punk interludes and gritty, guitar-driven monsters. These unwittingly expose the group’s musical influences, and define its fundamental essence. This is the Beastie Boys in their natural state, where they have nothing left to prove and only critical appreciation to gain. Ill Communication differed from the band’s usual anarchistic and boyish flavours by gliding into a realm with a deeper appreciation for sampling, musicianship, musical arrangement and storytelling.</p>
<p>With a jazz flute sample taken from Jeremy Steig’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etOrYtQ3EGc">Howlin’ for Judy</a>, and a layered drum break taken from Run-DMC’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JN7MXyC678">Rock the House</a>, the opening track of the album, Sure Shot, bounces into an energetic myriad of break beat drums and lyrically fragmented phrases referencing music and pop culture icons:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Cause you can’t, you won’t and you don’t stop
</p><p> Mike D come and rock the sure shot
</p><p>I’ve got the brand new doo-doo guaranteed like Yoo Hoo [a popular, chocolate-flavoured soft drink]
</p><p>I’m on like Dr John, yeah, Mr Zu Zu [<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpHj2TKtpfk">Zu Zu Man</a> by New Orleans musician Dr. John]</p>
<p>I’m a newlywed, I’m not a divorcee
</p><p>And everything I do is funky like Lee Dorsey [<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e8t908XhVI">Everything I Do Is Gonh Be Funky</a> by Allen Toussaint, recorded by Lee Dorsey]</p>
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<p>Cultural obsessions are nothing new for the Beastie Boys, but the breadth of material and the diversity of lyrical citation found here far outstripped their previous work on Licensed to Ill (1986), Paul’s Boutique (1989) and Check Your Head (1992). </p>
<p>The album features tracks such as Tough Guy, a short and sharp interlude reminiscent of their early punk roots referencing Bill Laimbeer (a tough NBA basketballer of the Detroit Pistons) and Root Down, a slippery deviation laced with a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP4LGEAfUEY">Jimmy Smith</a> sample of the same title.</p>
<p>Before too long, the album peaks, reaching the infamous Sabotage. With bone-crunching guitars and fuzz bass, this lyrically and rhythmically heavy song takes aim at the media and paparazzi with the band expressing its disapproval of the constant barrage of propaganda being spread to discredit musicians and celebrities. Their tongue-in-cheek, ’70s cop show, parody video clip, directed by Spike Jonze, received numerous MTV awards.</p>
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<p>While Sabotage is now rightly famous, it’s the collaboration between the Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip, Get It Together, that for me represents the pinnacle of this album. Teaming up with arguably one of the smoothest and most influential rappers of the era significantly enhances the album’s aesthetic appeal and offers a point of differentiation amid so many nasally driven raps. </p>
<p>Get It Together samples <a href="http://www.whosampled.com/sample/6132/Beastie-Boys-Q-Tip-Get-It-Together-The-Moog-Machine-AquariusLet-the-Sunshine-In/">Aquarius/Let The Sun Shine In by the Moog Machine</a>, <a href="http://www.whosampled.com/sample/1467/Beastie-Boys-Q-Tip-Get-It-Together-Eugene-McDaniels-Headless-Heroes/">Headless Heroes by Eugene McDaniels</a>, <a href="http://www.whosampled.com/sample/99641/Beastie-Boys-Q-Tip-Get-It-Together-James-Brown-Escape-Ism/">Escape-Ism by James Brown</a>, <a href="http://www.whosampled.com/sample/131726/Beastie-Boys-Q-Tip-Get-It-Together-Fred-Wesley-The-Horny-Horns-Four-Play/">Four Play by Fred Wesley and The Horny Horns</a> and <a href="http://www.whosampled.com/sample/99642/Beastie-Boys-Q-Tip-Get-It-Together-Biz-Markie-A-One-Two/">A One Two by Biz Markie</a> to create a distinct, misty blend of soul-jazz and funk-infused hip-hop that can be now considered quintessentially Beastie Boys.</p>
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<p>The instrumental component of this album is nothing short of exquisite. Songs such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU6qDwUzFW4">Sabrosa</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sj4UFcEyRY">Futterman’s Rule</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUiCXLbMXAQ">Ricky’s Theme</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrVnHjeQgiQ">Shambala</a> all contribute to its flow. </p>
<p>Where other hip-hop artists couldn’t offer such diversity in live musicianship, the Beastie Boys led the way in adding this instrumental flare to their sound. They left their stamp as innovators, crossing the boundaries of multiple genres.</p>
<p>To conclude, I must draw attention to the album’s final track <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRjedXaQ9Rg">Transitions</a>. The secret is in the title. Could this be the finale that subtly outlines their sonic signature and confirms that behind all good music is thought, emotion and purpose?</p>
<p>Transitions closes out Ill Communication by providing a moment of instrumental solace with its alluring, harmonic charm, but more so, the absence of the Beastie Boys’ trademark vocals deliberately draws attention to the quality of their musicianship. Ill Communication is undoubtedly a landmark recording for the Beastie Boys and one that defines the end of the Golden Age. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>What’s your favourite album? We’d like to hear from readers and will be publishing your best choices at the end of the week. Please email 100 words on your choice to James Whitmore at <a href="mailto:myfavouritealbum@theconversation.edu.au">myfavouritealbum@theconversation.edu.au</a></em> </p>
<p><em>Are you an academic who would like contribute to this series? Please contact <a href="mailto:james.whitmore@theconversation.edu.au">James Whitmore</a> or Suzy Freeman-Greene</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81104/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gene Shill does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication closed out hip-hop’s Golden Age with a kaleidoscope of jazz-infused beats, bratty punk interludes and a deeper appreciation for storytelling.Gene Shill, Associate Lecturer, Music Industry, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/829132017-09-11T19:40:14Z2017-09-11T19:40:14ZMy favourite album: The Cure’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185415/original/file-20170911-9447-1v4iw3k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>The album is an artistic statement, a swag of songs greater than the sum of its parts. In a new series, our authors nominate their favourites.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, The Cure’s seventh studio album is an 18-track, 70-minute plus extravagance of pure theatre. The album that cracked America and the endlessness of international suburbia. An album that gave us excuses for a thousand hours spent on dizzy edges, beds made of flowers, daylight licking us into shape. 1987. A time when stereos were an extension of your aesthetic and were either enormous or cute and bulbous and Hubba Bubba purple.</p>
<p>An album recalling quiet streets bordered by creeks and bushland at dusk – spooky, dark and ethereal. A catalogue of swampy sounds and small town longing. Staring past a ragged tree line wanting something to land. A UFO. A boy. A jabberwocky. Retreating to my room. Lying flat on my back on my white, satin bedspread gazing at the ceiling when there was time for gazing lost to make believe and lands made up in my head that looked like film clips. Peak MTV - when all the songs were synonymous with the images. </p>
<p>Robert Smith staring out of TVs. He saw things, like us, that weren’t there. Eyeballing cameras or hiding in the shadows. Waking up and rubbing his eyes and wombling around; twisting himself into shapes in crumbling mansions, coffins lost at sea, clutching the edges of cliffs. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3nPiBai66M">Just Like Heaven</a> when nothing was. The Cure were medicine like that. A soundtrack for what we already knew was coming. The end of spare time. The end of moments. The end of the world. Big bass. Soaring orchestral keyboards. Lonely lead guitars. </p>
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<p>Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was a play I hadn’t staged yet. A possibility of darkness. Riffing up and riffing out in elongated minutes – the album expands – songs going on for eternities, a wailing thing without words until they arrive. I’d love to touch the sky tonight.</p>
<p>My mate Cassidy says <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWPnYXldfY8">Catch</a> is my song – all far away eyes and falling down all the time. A stripped back ballad happening in charming, delicate air; playful and cheeky like a handful of other tracks on the album that tap into the Cure’s whimsical side. But I want to disappear into the dark romance of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HnJIr_J-a8">One More Time</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNIbAySExMA">If Only Tonight We Could Sleep</a>. </p>
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<p>I want a boy that’s dark but still like icing sugar. I want to be in love like love is here. I want cars that drive me away and motorbikes that never come back. Just to feel my heart for a second. And those keyboards, the deep synth inside me, driving on long roads hoping something might change. My girlfriends and I rolling through semi-rural wastelands with The Cure in the deck, windows down, howling into the wind. But no one ever kissed my neck quite like I wanted them to, like Robert said they would, like the sad refrains promised.</p>
<p>I like to imagine I’m the girl left by a boy in the rain on my favourite track, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTcrkhkacXU">Like Cockatoos</a>. A song full of dread and dramatic repetitions, as if we’re being pulled into the wrong small town at night, the implication of birds falling over the heavy, orchestral chords like fine glittering hail. </p>
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<p>I don’t meet Robert Smith in real life until the turn of the new millennium – the year 2000 and I’m working as assistant to the promoter of the Livid Festival. Typical Livid style, The Cure are a headline scoop, retro cool. In the early afternoon I see Robert unload himself out of a mini-bus. Dark glasses, faded black t-shirt definitely too tight, black lycra bike shorts. His pale English legs luminous in the sun. His infamous hair, greasy and lank. I’m disappointed. Later though, I have my moment. </p>
<p>Standing outside the office, taking a break at the top of the stairs behind the monolith of main stages Robert comes into view below me – exuberant bird’s nest head, body swathed in endless dark material, moving slowly like a gothic Buddha now he’s in different air, waiting for the angles and all the dark spirits to catch up. Raising his face to look at mine. A caked, white moon – the lurid gash of red swiped across his lips and into his cheeks – kohl savaged eyes. Hovering on the stair, considering me with the slightest hint of a smile. “Hello,” he says and then he winks. Like he remembers speaking to me through the TV on Saturday mornings. Like he misses hanging in the backseat on all those lonely drives. Like he knows. And all around, the night sings out like cockatoos.</p>
<p>Listening to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me now makes me want to write my resignation letter. Like I forgot to be something the songs promised or something I’d promised myself. To live inside a poem. Back when those chords soared through me like lightening and I might have had the guts. An album that got into my skin, that’s still curling around in there somewhere like the filigree traces of LSD.</p>
<p>Now I’m dreaming of running away to Nicaragua to disappear somewhere where the routines and the administration can’t get me. I wonder where Robert and the rest of The Cure might be but then I want to remain naive. I want them to stay just as I remembered them when I was a teenager and I wonder if they ever think of us. All those 80s kids they damaged so perfectly. Running to their hearts to be near.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>What’s your favourite album? We’d like to hear from readers and will be publishing your best choices at the end of the week. Please email 100 words on your choice to James Whitmore at <a href="mailto:myfavouritealbum@theconversation.edu.au">myfavouritealbum@theconversation.edu.au</a></em> </p>
<p><em>Are you an academic who would like contribute to this series? Please contact <a href="mailto:james.whitmore@theconversation.edu.au">James Whitmore</a> or Suzy Freeman-Greene</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82913/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sally Breen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Cure’s seventh studio album was an 18-track, 70-minute plus extravagance of pure theatre and dark romance.Sally Breen, Senior Lecturer in Writing and Publishing, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/798992017-09-08T01:24:47Z2017-09-08T01:24:47ZMy favourite album: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184121/original/file-20170831-24251-mh90rt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>The album is an artistic statement, a swag of songs greater than the sum of its parts. In a new series, our authors nominate their favourites.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (1985) was the first album I heard on CD. With its use of the Fairlight CMI (a digital synthesizer/sampler workstation), digital reverb, and drum machines, it was perhaps eminently suitable for the CD format. But under its shiny digital sound, Hounds of Love was very much an LP, as seen in its two-part structure.</p>
<p>Side one, Hounds of Love, covers themes characteristic of Bush: intimacy and its limits (Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) and The Big Sky); familial love (albeit darkly articulated in Mother Stands for Comfort); and the intensity and ambivalence of sexual desire (Hounds of Love). </p>
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<p>Meanwhile, side two comprises of The Ninth Wave, a song cycle about a woman who has fallen into the sea at night, with only the “little light” of her life jacket to guide her. From this premise, the protagonist experiences several intense psychological effects, ranging from the <a href="https://patient.info/doctor/hypnagogic-hallucinations">hypnogogic</a> to the nightmarish. Most dramatic is the celestial out-of-body experience of Hello Earth, just prior to the final song in which the protagonist is reborn into “the sweet morning fog”, newly experiencing the force of her love for her family and loved ones.</p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">vinylmeister/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>The cycle begins with two notes (a rising perfect fifth), an interval that is conspicuously inverted (into a falling perfect fifth) at the cycle’s end. In between is an extraordinary mélange of styles, melodic invention, and timbres. But the musical symmetry of the cycle’s opening and closing notes complements the lyrics’ repeated use of oppositional imagery, such as under/over; in/out; up/down; microcosmic/macrocosmic; and so on. </p>
<p>Complete with an epigraph from Tennyson, this second side smuggles in a musical style — prog rock — whose stocks were at their lowest ebb during the post-punk years. As Ron Moy argues in his <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/938654.Kate_Bush_and_Hounds_of_Love_Ashgate_Popular_and_Folk_Music_Series_">2007 book on the album</a>, Hounds of Love is </p>
<blockquote>
<p>classically prog in broad conceptual and often musical terms. However, it reined in many of the excesses of the genre, thus rendering its ambition and experimentation more accessible and palatable to a mainstream audience.</p>
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<p>While “restrained” might not be a word often associated with Bush (so theatrical, so intense, such a perfectionist), Hounds of Love benefits from an exceptional musical restraint. (Indeed, its one major misstep is when <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV7w5TaYjRA">The Big Sky</a> lapses into bombastic repetition). Such restraint can be heard on the eponymous song, which brilliantly uses cello parts where one would expect electric guitar and bass.</p>
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<p>Meanwhile, <a href="kate%20bush%20Mother%20Stands%20for%20comfort">Mother Stands for Comfort</a> benefits from its skeletal arrangement, with a dry, metronomic drum part providing the framework for the interaction between Bush’s piano and Eberhard Weber’s fretless electric bass. </p>
<p>As suggested by Moy, Bush’s sense of restraint is matched by musical ambition and expressiveness. Most expressive of all is Bush’s voice. Bush had always employed an extraordinary range of dramatic vocal effects, especially in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2Wa0LdCsvM">The Dreaming</a> (1982), but in Hounds of Love she also employs her lower register to great effect, giving her voice a new range and maturity. </p>
<p>As the cover art of her 1980 album <a href="http://www.katebush.com/image/never-ever-album-cover">Never For Ever</a> attests, Bush had also always brought together a peculiarly English blend of the pastoral and the gothic. In Hounds of Love, the pastoralism of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_256xd9N27o">And Dream of Sheep</a> is matched with the gothicism of Waking the Witch. </p>
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<p>But the mixture of light and dark, idealism and nightmare, can be found in individual songs, most especially in what is (for me) the album’s highlight, Hello Earth. </p>
<p>This song’s lullaby-like verses are ghosted by the extraordinary choral sections (brilliantly performed by the Richard Hickox Singers) that stand in for its missing chorus. These choral sections are taken from a Georgian folk song that appears in Werner Herzog’s 1979 film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079641/">Nosferatu the Vampyre</a>.</p>
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<p>Like David Bowie before her (though more so), Bush is essentially theatrical, as her two short stints of live performance (in 1979 and 2014) illustrated. But her songs are also theatrical in the sense that they so often represent characters who are obviously not Bush. These include a bank robber, Houdini’s wife, a young soldier, and, more recently, a person in love with a snowman. </p>
<p>Inhabiting another’s subjectivity is both an erotic and gothic trope, things brought together in the title song of Hounds of Love, which samples dialogue from the 1957 British horror film, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050766/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Night of the Demon</a> (also known as Curse of the Demon). Spoken by a medium channeling a dead character (“It’s in the trees; it’s coming!”), the moment is a perfect metaphor for Bush-as-songwriter herself.</p>
<p>Channeling other characters is what Bush has done since the beginning of her career with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1pMMIe4hb4">Wuthering Heights</a> (1978), a song that precociously fuses eroticism with a voice from beyond the grave. In Hounds of Love, Bush’s extraordinary vocal performances are the musical equivalent of speaking in tongues. It might not be a perfect album, but there are few more thrilling, literate, and ambitious works of popular music. It is hard not to be spellbound by it.</p>
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<p><em>What’s your favourite album? We’d like to hear from readers and will be publishing your best choices at the end of the week. Please email 100 words on your choice to James Whitmore at <a href="mailto:myfavouritealbum@theconversation.edu.au">myfavouritealbum@theconversation.edu.au</a></em> </p>
<p><em>Are you an academic who would like contribute to this series? Please contact <a href="mailto:james.whitmore@theconversation.edu.au">James Whitmore</a> or Suzy Freeman-Greene</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79899/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David McCooey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In Hounds of Love, Kate Bush’s extraordinary vocal performances are the musical equivalent of speaking in tongues. There are few more thrilling, literate, and ambitious works of popular music.David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.