I Was Provoked

I was fishing around the internets to find something to complain about (due to a fairly bland American Idol episode last night) and ended up on Blender Magazine's website. In their blog section I noticed the newest blog's title was "The Year's Most Provocative Music Video" and my interest was provoked. I rarely see music videos, for they have gone the way of the snow leopard. They are hard to find and I'm too lazy to go looking.

With the help of an embedded YouTube movie:

The snoozefest known as Dizzee Rascal: “Sirens” by Director: W.I.Z. is a British rapper's political piece against...uh...racial profiling? Here is the write-up by Blender:

In the most recent issue of Blender, there’s an excellent piece by Dorian Lynskey on the plight of "hoodies" in England. The term has come to define a spectral type of hood-wearing troublesome youth that many--including the British government--have come down upon in recent years with petty restrictions. But, while so-called hoodies have been responsible for some violence, statistics show the idea of an out-of-control teen gangs looting and stabbing their way through life has been largely manufactured by the media. London rapper Dizzee Rascal takes this controversy and spikes it with racial signifiers in his remarkably powerful video for “Sirens.” The clip has a group of pale, red-coated fox hunters (old England) chasing after a hoodie'd Dizzee (new England) as if he were just another piece of prey. Brilliantly filmed by prodigious video director W.I.Z., “Sirens” is provocative, suspenseful and, above all else, unsettling in its depiction of Britain’s current culture wars.

This video is neither "remarkable" or "powerful." This video takes a long time to make a single point which is entirely literal. White people on a fox hunt chasing a black man through the streets at night with a repetitive lethargic hip hop soundtrack. I'm not a fan of hip hop. It has its moments, but overall I dislike the fact that it is sometimes elevated so eagerly to some high level artistic plane. I just have a hard time appreciating this song and video as "provocative, suspensful, and above all else, unsettling" when the song is about a guy getting chased by "Sirens" and the video shows him being chased. Wow, thats powerful stuff.

Aina Mania

All of us here at Something Vexes really like the band Aina. That would be the indie/punk/whatever-rock supergroup from Barcelona, not the metal opera collective. Although they are often lumped together by sources such as allmusic.com, they really couldn't be more easily distinguishable.

Anyhoo, after I found a nifty collection of videos from a recent Aina reunion show on YouTube, I decided to take another look at their listing on allmusic. After breezing past the aforementioned 20-member metal opera collective, I found a review of our Aina's 2001 album Bipartite. A dude named Kurt Morris wrote the 3-star (out of 5) review, and he really heaped on the lukewarm praise. He basically said that the sound is too strongly rooted in Burning Airlines and Jawbox to be taken very seriously on its own. Leaving aside the fact that I probably would have rated it a solid 5 stars, this is the part that bothered me the most:

Supposedly Aina puts on a rocking good live show and that may be part of the reason for this otherwise unspectacular disc being released.

Do what now? I guess if it were a live album, this would make sense. "You know, these guys have several records out already, and they have a loyal following. And, boy, do they rock the shit live. You know what? Let's get them back in the studio. Quick."