There's a defeatist absolutism in operation here - and in the CD booklet illustration of a school in flames - which negates their righteousness elsewhere, and which, on a more basic level, harms none but those stupid enough to use it as an excuse for everything bad.ĪSIAN DUB FOUNDATION | Community Music (London)
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"They schools can't teach us shit," they claim, which may be true, but might not be entirely the school's fault. So while it's a welcome relief to find hip-hoppers prepared to eschew the petty territoriality of "the red and the blue" for the African motherland orientation of "the red, the gold and the green" - and something of a shock to hear overt calls for the implementation of a socialist economy - it's frustrating to find them slipping into knee-jerk castigation of "white man's lies" when it comes to the matter of education. There's an interesting stew of sometimes contradictory attitudes and influences bubbling around in this debut offering from avowedly revolutionary rappers M1 and Stickman of Dead Prez: afrocentrism, eastern mysticism (witness the I-Ching hexagram on the sleeve), new-man sexuality, lentil-head vegetarianism, downright racism and (whisper it quietly) socialism. If the film is half as good as this, it should be a corker. The watercolour tints of Chamberlin strings, the occasional wan accordion, and sometimes the deceptive formality of piccolo and oboe augment the piano and guitar-based settings, imbuing the whole album - apart from the two Supertramp tracks tacked on to the end - with a beguiling air of restrained melancholy. It's the tension between Mann's disarmingly direct, conversational lyric style and the depth and complexity of the musical design that gives Magnolia its enduring power. Take "Deathly", for instance, a song which opens with lines as brutally frank as "Now that I've met you/ Would you object to/ Never seeing each other again?", before explaining such rejection in even tougher terms: "Cause I'm just a problem/ For you to solve and/ Watch dissolve in the heat of your charm." From her days as prime mover behind adult-contemporary combo 'Til Tuesday, she's demonstrated an ability to burrow beneath the façades of relationships to expose the underlying emotional knots that confound happiness: she's the RD Laing of songwriters, as it were.
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It's easy to see what drew Anderson to Mann's work.
#Magnolia soundtrack supertramp series#
things that I was thinking", and decided to develop the script for Magnolia - an Altman-esque series of stories about the difficulty of finding true love - around the songs. He was struck by the way "she seemed to be thinking.
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In the sleeve note Anderson, an Aimee Mann fan, admits "adapting" her songs into a screenplay, the same way one would adapt a novel for the screen. Magnolia is the soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson's highly-acclaimed follow-up to Boogie Nights, though the director says it's rather more than just a soundtrack.