I've paid my dues. I've written lengthy articles often enough. Now I get to make some nice, content-lite posts about stuff I think is awesome. There's my justification. First up, music. Plus, I watch my search logs: this will easily reach 4000 direct hits in the month after I publish it, and sometimes a boy likes an audience. So, a bunch of songs I think are particularly fine, and which I can find on YouTube.
Stinkfist - Tool. Some of the most beautiful music I know of being made right now, tied as closely as anything i can think of to as over-arching design element in their sound, videos, live sets and more. I know someone who once watched a stack of four or five of these on MTV2 late one night, and says that she began to have a grasp of just what they were about. In the morning, however, this sanity-blasting knowledge was gone. If someone was to sit down and watch all Tool's videos in one sitting the effect would probably be not unlike reading the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Al'Hazred, with super-explanatory Cliff notes. Why not give it a try? Aenima. Parabola. Schism. Vicarious. See the odd one out there?
FEAR - Ian Brown. Could so easily be Golden Gaze, or the Be There [edit - fuller version now] collaboration with Unkle (who also worked with Brown when remixing FEAR). Ian Brown has an incredible, outstanding record of work, whether it is solo, in the Stone Roses, or in collaboration with others. I'm not a huge fan of some of his album-fillers, but he can create pure gold in singles.
An Eye for an Eye - Unkle. Yes, I couldn't keep him out. He is usually provocative in his videos (see Be There, above, or Rabbit in Your Headlights, with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke) but this is in another league. I don't usually like stuff as unrelentingly sad as this gorgeous but disturbing video, but it is too wonderful for me to eschew.
Dayvan Cowboy - Boards of Canada. I harbour more fondness than most for Leadburn and Howgate, but this beautiful, poignant instrumental piece is exactly what you don't expect to spring from the Penicuik area. But the band are indeed based out of a refurbished nuclear bunker in the Pentland Hills. From their Campfire Headphase album. The first footage is from the . The shot of the dolphin playing in the surf at around 3:15 onwards gives me a cold rush of joy every time I see it (and alienates me a little more from Japanese fishermen with each viewing).
Devil's Eyes - Buck 65. I bet the record company begged them not to put in the first minute of this video. As it was, almost no TV channel played the first part, skipping instead to the song proper. And yet Michael 'Boss Cracker' Jackson gets that weird bit of him on top of the car played? I ask you...
Call the Ships to Port - Covenant. They used to be mad-eyed goths. Now they are cool, techno-goths.
Another Body Murdered - Faith No More and the Boo Ya Tribe. I honestly think that the original soundtrack from this dreadful, dreadful film (Judgement Night) nonetheless played a not-insignificant role in the rise of nu-metal with its theme of rap/metal crossover. Each song was a collaboration between one guitar band and one rap act. Anything that can bring the Teenage Fanclub and De La Soul onto the same album as Slayer and Cypress Hill has to be worth a listen.
My Kingdom - Future Sound Of London. I've loved this silly, ultra-modernist video for years. It always felt very Gibsonian. I kinda like the imagery around the 1:30 mark onwards: it is rather like I imagine an encounter with UFOs on earth actually would be: utterly foreign and alien, incapable of interaction, unaware of any human ideas of hiding or graduality: just there. I also always wanted to start a tribute band called Future Sound of Harthill.
The Mercy Seat - Johnny Cash. This is one of the series of cover versions that Cash did in the last few years of his life where, merely by performing a variety of great songs by modern writers, he revealed startling new sides of each. This is, of course, one of the more obvious of the tracks he chose. Contrast Nine Inch Nails' track Hurt with Cash's cover: a heartbreaking piece featuring he and June Carter shortly before their deaths.
Aisha - Death in Vegas. This is a superb song. The voiceover (slightly accelerated in this video version, unfortunately) is by Iggy Pop, and his voice is wonderfully fitting. The video got banned in an age when such things are very hard to achieve.
Teardrop - Massive Attack. This is another collaboration, this time between MA and the vocalist from the Cocteau Twins, Elizabeth Fraser (another Edinburgh link in the list!). As such it is something of a rarity, in that Liz sings in English, as opposed to the personal made-up dialect she used in the bulk of Cocteau Twins songs, and which sounded deceptively like English but, on closer examination, never was. As an aside, the "black flowers blossom" line presses quite the button with me, since it reminds me of the Gaia-explanation in Edge of Darkness, from when I was a child and a nuclear war and winter was a terrifying, entrancing possibility. Teardrop edged out Karmacoma, featuring Tricky on vocals and a far better video. But only just. Also recommended: Inertia Creeps and Angel.
Vagabonds - New Model Army. After all these tremendously expensive videos (I never knew where the money for FSOL or Unkle extravaganzas came from) here is the absolute opposite of the scale, from a band named after after Cromwellian military reforms and who in the late 80s were already standing in the ground only now occupied by today's anti-capitalist movement. Not that I hold with all that grebo-hippy nonsense...