Underworld

One question that bands and musicians are asked more often than anything else is what their inspiration is. What bands they listen to, who they try to emulate. I can say without a doubt that the band what I've tried most often to imitate is Underworld.

Oh sure, there is a lot of influence from (but not limited to) Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Faithless, The Beloved, Chemical Brothers, Moby, Yello, New Order, Art Of Noise, Juno Reactor, Kraftwerk, and a whole lot more that I can't even think of now. But Underworld is the driving force behind what I've done since 2005.

Underworld is a band that when you mention it to someone, they either a) think you're talking about the movie 'Underworld', b) have no idea what you're talking about, or c) go, oh yeah, "Lager Lager Lager', right?" More than a one trick pony, Underworld is a band that has been around in one form or another since the 80's, and I've tried to enlighten people to this since I first heard 'Second Toughest In The Infants' in 1996.

A brief History of Underworld, if you will:

Karl Hyde and Rick Smith began as two members of a synth-pop band called Freur in 1983, and their big hit was 'Doot Doot'. Their name was spelled as an unrecognizable symbol, beating Prince to the punch by several years.

In 1986 Freur became Underworld (Mark 1, as they refer to it) and it was a six-piece ensemble in the pop realm, They struck some minor success with their first album 'Underneath The Radar', and a second album didn't perform as well. 1990 saw the first incarnation of the band disappear.

in 1992, Karl and Rick teamed up with DJ Darren Emerson and they revamped the sound of their creations more to what insiders feel is the quintessential Underworld as we know it: driving beats, quirky, obscure and poetic vocals and synth sounds. After releasing a number of singles under the moniker Lemon Interrupt, they became Underworld Mark 2 and released a slew of singles, remixes and albums. The inclusion of 'Born Slippy.NUXX' to the 'Trainspotting' soundtrack in 1996 was their biggest coup, opening their music up to a whole new range of people.

Apart from this hit, their other notable singles include 'Cowgirl' (featured on the soundtrack to 'Hackers'), 'Push Upstairs', 'Pearls Girl' and 'King Of Snake'. Underworld have also lent their hand to many remixes for others, including Bjork, Depeche Mode, Leftfield, Front 242, Chemical Brothers, St. Etienne, William Orbit and Massive Attack to name a few.

On a personal note, I came to know Underworld as many others: from 'Trainspotting' But as I usually do in cases like this, I don't stop there, I find more and more music from an artist i like, go back in time and see where they came from, and what their MO is. I knew I liked dancing to the record, but was that all there was to it?

When I found and bought 'Second Toughest In The Infants', I was immediately hooked. The 16-minute long trilogy of an opening track ('Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream Of Love') simply captivated me in its intricacies, and I don't kind telling you that it brought me almost to tears on more than one occasion. I know this is hard for most people to believe that so-called 'techno music' could evoke such a response, but that is what Underworld do: they craft and sculpt a song or album in such a way that its more than just something to dance to. They put so much thought and emotion into it (I think) and it's not just about a beat or a synth, it's a process of exploration and seeing what happens. It's that creative process that I had been trying to achieve in my own work (and most of the time not to my expectations) and there it was right in front of me. To my mind, they had nailed what I had been trying to find in myself. The ability to put into music everything that I was feeling at the time of writing.

Oftentimes, as their career went on, I would hear a new song from Underworld, and immediately have an idea for a song of my own. For example. Since I heard the aforementioned album, I began to try to find a way to meld my own songs together to make longer tracks. I did this on my first collection with 'I'm Not Dead/1,269 and Rising', in 2006, but the pinnacle of this idea was made for me with the latest album which has three tracks combined together to form a 20 minute long track: 'Bad Day/Dad's Day/Hard Candy' aka 'The Unforetold' suite -- then I reversed and remixed the order for an alternate version called 'The Nine-Oh Five."

To me this is the best example of the effect Underworld has had on my creative process. I even managed to write lyrics based on their example. Karl tends to write what seems to be nonsense on the surface, but if you listen (or read their various explications of such things) you can see that every song does indeed have a theme. It may not sport proper grammar or even real words, but it's a theme all the same, in a stream of consciousness kind of way. That was how I wrote the lyrics for my latest record. I froze a moment on time, and explored every facet of that moment and put those facets into words, sounds feelings, emotions -- a very forensic process of observation.

And its more than just the music. You can tell that the members of Underworld are really digging what they are doing. They are a part of every aspect of their music, their live shows, their album art, their image, everything. Their website, underworldlive.com, features personal input from the band, blog-style, on a regular basis -- photographs, demo tunes, unreleased music and music that you can only get from their site. They have live podcasts of music that they like, some by unsigned artists. They manage their own graphic arts studio called Tomato, which often has 'Art Jams' featuring nearby creators who come in for a day or two and just do what they do. They have released a couple of typography books which read like the lyrics to their songs, but are creatively designed to be a visual experience as well as a verbal one.

In short, they expose every aspect of their art and their lives as it relates to the creative process, which is something I've also been doing for a long time. The creative process is so very important to those who have the talent, and they have certainly not dropped the ball in this department.

It's hard for me to really find any fault with them, quite frankly. Even the things I don't really care for, songs or pursuits or what have you, I really have to respect in spite of that, because they are doing it. Not for the money, I suspect. Just because they want to. And they want others to be involved. It reminds me of something a friend of mine said ten years ago about trying to gather a 'group of non-assholes', which I took to mean people who just wanted to create and be there while other did the same, with no selfishness or trying to steal the limelight. Unfortunately we never found it, but I'm glad to see that someone did.

On August 11, I will be seeing Underworld at the Kool Haus in Toronto for the first time since I started listening to them. I'm 36 years old and generally at concerts I don't move around much, I prefer to sit and take in the spectacle so I don't miss anything. But I assure you that if the show is anything even remotely like the 2000 Live DVD concert footage I have, I'm gonna be raving around like a teenager on X, even though I'm a 36-year old single father who doesn't do drugs. I simply can't wait. I'm actually going to take a half-day and go to a meet up party before the show with a bunch of people I've never met before. I'm so psyched that I'll be able to be in the same room with people that have made so much of a difference in my musical life.

10 REASONS TO LOVE UNDERWORLD

1: The video for 'Dinosaur Adventure 3D'

2: This lyric to 'Moaner'

the city loves you
city loves a boyfriend long walks with a boyfriend
city loves a boyfriend friends walking with the boyfriend
and the nights with the boyfriend
and the city loves you
loves you
loves you loves everyone
everyone is smiling
the smiling is pushing it around
pushing it around
like the shadows of evolution in the dark
super boys where time is all
and where time is everything
where time is all
time to earth
earth wind and fire
and the sun in your hair
black metal walls are falling
i'm the hunger
i'm metal
i'm stainless
i'm milk in your plastic

3: Many different digital downloads of live shows performed in 2007 and 2008, each with its own cover art, culled from the 'art jam' induced painting for the cover of 'Oblivion With Bells'.

4: The fact that they can do stomping hard trance and techno tracks and just as easily do a chill out track using only a retriggered guitar sample, cut up and affected and still make it seem like the same people doing it.

5: The 'Soft Mix' of Depeche Mode's 'Barrel Of A Gun'

Barrel Of A Gun [Underworld Soft Mix] - Depeche Mode

If this isn't enough to convince you, then just take my word for it.

Michael Jackson And The Social Media Revolution

It's time for me to chime in on the Michael Jackson thing. I have been following the story since the day of his death, and I'm truly upset by this, like so many other people. Those who know me know that I'm a bit of a fanboy; not quite as much as those grown men that I saw on some recent footage on CNN, who were seen screaming and crying like footage you see of Beatlemania, but I've followed his career and his music since the release of Thriller. I have a few books and a more than the average person's knowledge of his timeline.

I saw this coming, and I realized that I would probably be alive to see his death come to pass, but I didn't think it would be this soon. Then again, I also could not picture Michael being an old man, and I seriously doubt he could have seen it either.

The reason I'm writing this now is that I have found myself sucked into the social media frenzy surrounding this event, and as a result have signed up for a Twitter account, so that I could see the world's reaction to this. I had already seen some of this through my Facebook account, and it is by now a well known fact that social media websites took the forefront in spreading this bad news throughout the world. So I wanted to experience the memorial I just finished watching from this perspective.

Most of the 'tweets' I read were what I expected. Heartfelt sadness and celebrations of his life, well-wishes to his family and so forth. I found LeVar Burton's (Geordi from Star Trek TNG) Twitter account by accident yesterday, and added it to my following; today he was reporting several times from row 19 at the Staples Center. Most people reacted the way I anticipated.



And then there were the others. Because Michael was the way he was, and he had the life that he had, he has never ever been safe from the ridicule of others. Depending on who you believe, he brought this on himself with his bizarre behaviour. 'Bizarre' is a word that, by some accounts, he actually instructed the journalistic community to use when writing articles on him -- specifically in reports of sleeping in hyperbaric chambers and so on -- being of the opinion that no publicity is bad publicity. I can't confirm if any of that is true. But it's just the kind of confusion that has surrounded him his entire life.

Making matters worse, you have this whole matter of the child molestation charges, which brings a whole new flock of haters to the table. You only have to mention this topic to bring out the rage. The facts are that he was acquitted of those charges -- twice -- and that is supposed to be enough to convince everyone that he is in fact innocent. But of course that doesn't happen on a global scale. There are those who will believe vehemently in his innocence, and those who will forever label him a diddler, and that's all there is to it.

I don't know whether he did those things or not. I don't pretend to know -- I wasn't there... which is why I prefer to concentrate on the good things he did - his music, his talent, and the good works he so obviously did for the world at large. I'm not saying he wasn't a weird guy. That's apparent. But with the reality of his death firmly established, some people still feel the need to express their oh-so-tired opinions of Michael in the world forum and stir up a bunch of bad feelings and cause trouble.

Some were more or less in bad taste -- a similar flavour to the jokes that circulated when Michael was burned at the Pepsi commercial filming -- such as this one scanned on twitter:

Wouldn't it be funny if Michael Jackson lept out of the gold coffin singing "Thriller" and then did the zombie dance?

I myself might be guilty of a similar exercise in possible tactlessness when I said to a friend in England that he could probably still sell out the O2 shows even if they just put his coffin on the stage. However, seeing the fervour around the memorial service and the amount of people who wanted to get in but couldn't, I'm not so sure that I was actually incorrect in saying this.

Some, I feel, really believed that the death was a hoax, and that somewhere, Michael was getting reconstructive surgery to cash in on his death and live the rest of his life in seclusion. Some people have predicted that Michael Jackson is the new Elvis, and sightings of him will be reported for the next 10 years.

Then there those who felt the need to ramp it up a little. I won't pay blog service to any of them, but some were actually happy the man was dead, and cited his alleged-but-not-proven child molestation as a justification for his death. One twitterer actually responded to Smokey Robinson's comment that Michael was looking down from heaven by saying that he was in fact screaming up from hell. So much for innocent until proven guilty.

And then there were those who had just lost perspective on what is actually going on, such as an L.A. resident who reported that

the traffic in LA is even worse than usual. Even in death, MJ still sucks.

There is more, much more than what I am relaying here. Pages and pages of people who really have no concept of karma, disrespecting a dead man, first and foremost. One has to wonder whether such people would react the same if a funeral procession of a so-called normal person was hindering their ability to get somewhere in a timely fashion... Are they just inherently cold-blooded, or was it the fact that Michael was probably the most famous and controversial entertainer in history and they had to add their voices to the fray?

Some in my age range might remember that at one point it was taboo to admit to liking Michael Jackson. I remember on several occasions I would be ridiculed on the playground for wearing a Thriller t-shirt and being called a fag. The battle between Jacko lovers and haters has been going on since the beginning, at a feverish pitch near the start, and then dissolving into a relative cold war in the 90's. Now it seems that some of it is back as the man's demise takes over the media and everyone has to pick their sides in this final chapter of the man's life.

It's truly saddening to realize that some people just don't get that a man is dead, and regardless of the life he led, it's not appropriate to publicly badmouth the man regardless of what you think of him. Of course it's the ease of social media that makes this possible, and prevalent in our society, the ability to express bullshit opinions to a much larger audience then was possible before. You're able to piss so many more people off nowawdays, and certain individuals just can't seem to resist the temptation. For their sakes, they should hope that karma actually doesn't exist, because I have to believe that dissing a dead man is probably among the worst offenses in this realm.

For my part, I remain a fan, and I was truly moved by most of the appearances at the memorial, and was completely blown away by Stevie Wonder who sung my favourite song of his, "They Won't Go When I Go." Over the next days, I feel that more information about the circumstances of his death will come out, whatever they may be, and sadly the detractors and naysayers will only get louder. Thankfully, I think, they are of the minority.

As a last message to those of you out there who feel the need to speak ill of the dead, I urge you to watch the last few minutes of the memorial where the Jackson family all got up to speak and the daughter of Michael began to cry while saying that her father was the best daddy ever. Only the most stone-cold bastard could watch that and not be affected by the sight of a little girl crying at the death of her father. Even if you don't like the man, you need to shut the hell up for the sake of those that remain, and have some damn respect. It's easy to sluff this off because he's a celebrity and you don't know the man or the family involved so why not say whatever you want? You need to check yourselves: real people are dealing with real loss, that's life, and you would only want the same for yourself if it were to happen to you... and it will -- eventually. That's all.