Songs of the year - so far...

1. Pet Shop Boys - 'Legacy'
2. Camera Obscura - 'My Maudlin Career'
3. Passion Pit - 'Sleepyhead'
4. Calvin Harris - 'I'm Not Alone'
5. Dizzee Rascal & Armand Van Helden - 'Bonkers'
6. Charles Spearin - 'Vanessa'
7. Malcolm Middleton - 'Red Travellin' Socks'
8. Belbury Poly - 'A Great Day Out'
9. Manic Street Preachers - 'Jackie Collins Existential Question Time'
10. Toddla T. ft. Roots Manuva & Siobhan Gallagher - 'Sunny Money'

#3 and #7 were on the recommendation of a particularly discerning student.

Ten from the past:

Long Fin Killie - 'British Summertime'
Basil Kirchin - 'I Start Counting'
Clifford T. Ward - 'A Sad Cliche'
Duncan Browne - 'The Ghost Walks' (though frankly any on his magnificent 1968 LP)
Aztec Camera - 'Mattress of Wire'
John Barry - 'The Persuaders'*
The Legendary Pink Spots - 'Government Health Warning' (much else from them too**)
The Passage - 'Xoyo'
Janet Jackson - 'When I Think of You'
Michael Jackson - 'Rock with You'

* Well used by BBC Parliament to underscore the opening to their Fall of the Callaghan Govt. night.
** A discovery made by chance, as he was being interviewed with career overview on Resonance FM not too long ago, which I happened to be streaming via iTunes...

Jackson preliminaries

Ghost at the feast, A. That is what one tends to feel like regarding the bizarre, enthralling and disturbing Jackson and the number of intriguing pieces of writing about him and what he may have represented:

K-Punk: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011204.html

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011200.html

Hatherley: http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2009/06/we-are-only-world.html

Carmody: http://in-the-cage.blogspot.com/2009/06/michael-jackson.html

http://in-the-cage.blogspot.com/2009/07/michael-jackson-now-dust-has-settled.html

Carlin: http://garbocathedral.blogspot.com/2009/06/and-though-you-fight-to-stay-alive-your.html

Morley: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/28/michael-jackson-death

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/interactive/2009/may/14/paul-morley-michael-jackson (including languid thoughts from people such as Traceyanne from Camera Obscura. Swoon.)

I only came upon him in the Dangerous-and-onwards period, and few can surely pretend he was the same. So many projections, so little of a man there by the end. A media grotesque, an embodiment of celebrity / corporate culture and how it can corrupt. It was not the case in 1979, but then that was pre-Reagan; Funkadelic and Chic were mainstream, incipient hip-hop promised so much.

I will do a piece on Jackson's work, bringing in some of the wider context - not hoping to math the other articles above, just hoping to give my own necessarily partial assessment of the entire back catalogue. I feel I should know it more, and this is an ideal opportunity to explore it in more depth.

Draft impressions / prejudices / hypotheses:

• Off the Wall the early pinnacle.
• Heal the World and other follies
• 'Stranger in Moscow' is great - worthy of the Pet Shop Boys as I think someone else once said.
• Bad the most 'pop' album - an epitome of where he was at when at his biggest
• Thriller over-exposed; I'm a bit bored by it, frankly. And it marked the crossover into corporate 'icon' and artist-as-advertisement to be projected all around the world.
• Did he work well with Jam and Lewis? If not, who or what was to blame?
• Is Janet not better? Surely nothing matches Control. Does his control go post-'Billie Jean', quality and artistry-wise.
• His Chaplin fixation - compare and contrast his own career with Chaplin's.
• Buying the Beatles's back catalogue - why?
• Jarvis Cocker incident - hubris punctured...? Sets himself up as God, attacks the way the world has become but proposes no answers - the projection cannot break out of the system.
• Why did he never attempt some proper techno madness? Or even something as out-there as Bablyon Zoo's 'Spaceman'?
• He is not one of the great pop artists*, because he is bigger than that - he practically *is* pop culture itself, in all its complexity. (*e.g. Prince, Kate Bush, Abba - who clearly are)