American 'Music' Awards

I was watching the American Music Awards (or AMA for short, as in 'Oh my god I'm so happy to just be nominated for an AMA!!') the other night and I've got to say, I felt pretty ashamed of myself, and my fellow humans. I mean it's not hard to see that culturally we're in dire straights. It seems that the popular thing at the moment are young girls, singing what appears to be nonsense whilst prostituting themselves for our musical 'pleasure'. I always wondered how in amongst all this hip hop (I'm really starting to sound like an old man now..) Country music was the biggest selling genre of American music. The problem was that I was thinking of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, when really I should have been thinking, younger, better looking, and all together more Aryan. Basically country music is now just Britney spears for Nashville.

Anyway In amongst all this nonsense I happened to switch over to BBC Four, which was showing an old Big Band Jazz live show from the 50's or 60's. The drummer was the first guy i saw, I forget his name, but it was something like 'lightning fast'. He was just that, and also musically gifted, his drum solo sounded beautiful, then the rest of the band kicked in and at once I felt inspired and happy to be alive. All I had to do was journey back in time fifty years. It was clear that at this time it was perfectly normal to dedicate an hour long show to musicians just doing their thing and improvising with each other. To me that's fantastic and also at the same time incredibly sad, because once that had finished I flicked back to the AMA's, saw the bone crushingly preposterous Jonas Brothers accepting an award and remembered that those days of creativity and appreciation of artistic talent are long gone.

The only exception to this sick mockery of all that humanity has achieved in the last century was Kanye West. That man has the right attitude, he is an artist through and through, and he accepted his award like one. Rather than the usual 'I'd like to thank my management and my label, and especially you, the fans!', he instead said simply that he was fed up of people telling him not to set his bar too high, not to attempt to achieve the artistic success of musicians like Jimi Hendrix.....and so he put it bluntly:

'I want to be Elvis'.

Good for you Kanye.

UBS Openings: Art from the 80's

A new exhibition of work from the 1980's has opened recently at Tate Modern. The paintings are all from the UBS collection, and represent an incredibly prosperous time for the art world. The Stars of this scene included well known artists like Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Schnabel and Basquiat are two of my favourite artists, and I've never seen their work shown in the UK before, so I was pretty eager to catch this exhibition. My favourite painting in the (admittedly rather small) exhibition was the one painting included by Basquiat, Tobacco Versus Red Chief, which I had never seen before, and was incredibly striking in the flesh. The exhibition runs until the 13th April 2009 and is worth seeing if you're a fan of this rather explosive period in art history.

'Art is what you can get away with'

There's currently an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, of a lot of interesting Andy Warhol work. Paintings, prints, film, TV, audio, interviews, drawings and plenty of other weird and wonderfully things created by the Artist in his lifetime are on display. It was like being submerged in his subversive and beautifully celebrity obsessed world. Here's an interview I found, in which Andy Warhol talks about his 'painting' process. Its hilarious to see how confused the interviewer is when Andy mentions that he doesn't paint his own paintings.

Mark Rothko Exhibition

As i mentioned before i was planning on visiting Tate Modern to have a look at the current Rothko exhibition. I did, and it was jaw dropping. Here's a short clip of the exhibition's curator, talking about Rothko's work.

Conversation about the film 'Basquiat'

Director Julian Schnabel and musician David Bowie, who plays Andy Warhol, being interviewed about the film and the artist. This film came in for a lot of criticism when first released, but its one of my favourite films and its nice to see such an intellectual discussion between artists.

Mark Rothko at Tate Modern

From 26th September until 1st February Tate Modern have an exhibition of works by Mark Rothko. He's one of my favourite artists so I'll definitely be going. The paintings are all works from the Seagram Murals series which were originally commissioned for The Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building New York, some of which could already be seen at Tate Modern in the Rothko Room. These works, in my opinion, are some of the most powerful paintings ever produced by the artist.

Bob Forrest

I've noticed that Bob Forrest has been getting a lot more recognition recently due to his work as a drug councillor on the celebrity rehab TV show. I find this really weird because I've always known him as a singer/songwriter, and a damn fine one at that. From his early days as the singer of Thelonious Monster in the late 80's and early 90's, through his critically acclaimed album released under the guise of 'The bicycle thief', to the most recent solo work, he has always been more disarmingly honest and soulful than most songwriters who are a thousand times more well known than him. He was always fighting his various addictions up until the mid to late nineties when he helped himself by helping others with similar problems. So i guess that's how he ended up on the show, and I hope that it turns more people on to his beautiful music. Here is a clip of him being interviewed and performing 'Body and Soul' with Thelonious Monster at a festival in Holland in 1993. He was a bit of a mess at the time, but still manages to give a very insightful interview.