Deep Cuts Week, Day Two: And Do I Really Have A Hand In My Forgetting?

Nico, "The Fairest Of The Seasons" - Paradoxical as it may sound, I'm not sure if history has done less for the music of any band than the Velvet Underground. Obviously their stature and visibility is miles above where it was thirty-odd years ago, but as someone who never got into their albums until after special-edition rigor mortis had frozen their musical output, I can say with absolute certainty that when you remove the decision as to where the Velvets fall on the art-rock plotline, you sap the challenge and the fun right out of an awful lot of their catalogue. I mean, who in their right mind is going to listen to all seventy-nine hours of "Venus In Furs" if you don't even let them figure out how to listen to it? All that droning structure and not-particularly-inviting experimentation suddenly exists seemingly for its own sake - isn't that basically just the art-rock equivalent of watching The Sixth Sense after having the ending ruined?

I guess it's not too surprising, then, that I prefer the Velvets' individual albums to their "official" ones, not least because at their best, they're extremely song-oriented without giving up on being incredibly idiosyncratic and incredibly baroque. As you can probably guess, Nico's Chelsea Girls gets the most plays around my apartment; even if you didn't know about Jackson Browne's input into the album it'd still be pretty hard to ignore all the fragile, off-center songcraft at work here. My favorite is "The Fairest Of The Seasons", a quiet, string-driven, introspective little number good enough to overcome even the most dedicated attempts at ruination at the hands of Wes Goddamned Anderson. What's interesting, though, is the fact that it's the songs like "The Fairest Of The Seasons" that taught me how to appreciate the more artistically expansive songs on the album; they're the ones that got me to stick around by being populous enough that eventually I just get too lazy to get up and skip the seven-minute title track or the eight-minute "It Was A Pleasure Then", which, over time, become just as useful as the more inviting stuff. Sounds like the real thing to me. (Click here to buy Chelsea Girls from Amazon.com)

Littl 'ans feat. Peter Doherty, "Their Way" - It's safe to say that this is probably the least impressive song Pete Doherty's ever had any involvement in, although I say that as someone who's probably listened to it forty times since ripping open my Rough Trade care package last Friday. I also say that as someone with the kind of unchecked wild-eyed unquestioning fandom of Doherty rarely seen outside the NME's page-boundaries and damn near never seen in America; it's just so refreshing to have a rock star willing to be so unabashedly crass as to give the media exactly what they want in a "rock star" to within three decimal places (death-on-toilet-with-needle-in-arm pending) that I can't help but join in on all the fun. "The fun", I hasten to add, is that Pete Doherty is, in addition to a completely lost and failed human being, a poet - not necessarily a good poet, mind you, but considering the festering ass-shit that gets passed off as poetry in contemporary music nowadays, I'm always more than happy to wade through the subjectivity of someone who illustrates their perspective in their songs rather than in their lyrics, if you get my drift. Here, the message seems to be...well, nothing of consequence, really; it's "just a song" in the way that the King Biscuit Time song was "just" one too, except with nicer-sounding lyrics and a backing track closer to the La's than to Kasabian. I'm sure I'm giving the shaft to Littl'ans, the actual, y'know, band at work here; this is mostly because I claim ignorance (I'd never heard of the band before this single, and even now all I know about them is that they're currently supporting Babyshambles on their album-release tour and that the lead guy used to be big-time involved in Add (N) To X), but c'mon; you can't really work with Pete Doherty without at least kinda expecting to fork over the lion's share of the spotlight. I mean, just ask Wolfman. (Click here to buy the "Their Way" single from Rough Trade)