Why does one of the best lyricists of his generation think it's cooler to drawl "Give me fever/ I'm a believer, yeah yeah" than to write a proper verse? Albarn's Iggy Pop impersonation is even less convincing than his Chas'n'Dave one. NBSkunk Anansie: Post Orgasmic Chill (Virgin) This doesn't start promisingly. Skunk Anansie's third album opens with a couple of characteristic agit-prop funk-metal work-outs just to prove that the band are still the angry politico-rock terrorists they've always been, however many million records they've sold. But these tracks amount to flailing, incoherent copies of their early material, and it's a relief when the band chill out, post-orgasmically or otherwise, and settle into a run of mid-tempo anthems and lighter-waving ballads. The lyrics dig into the guts of a relationship, Skin's voice is as unstoppable as ever, and a string orchestra is deployed more imaginatively than they usually are Hit singles coming up. NBRobert Wyatt: EPs (Hannibal)Five-CD boxed set of extended-play releases by the former Soft Machine drummer and all-round eminence grise of avant-garde English pop and rock. The famous cover version of the Monkees' "I'm a Believer" (which, following his accident, Wyatt memorably performed on Top of the Pops from his wheelchair), is included, along with the Falklands War-era "Shipbuilding" (written by Elvis Costello).
There are also excerpts from the soundtrack to Victor Schonfield's The Animals' Film, together with works in progress and remixes from last year's acclaimed Schleep album Hear 'em and weep PJ. Contemporary Delta Saxophone Quartet: Minimal Tendencies (Clarinet Classics) Beautifully recorded versions of Steve Reich's "New York Counterpoint", Gavin Bryars's "Alaric 1 or 11", Nyman's "Songs for Tony", Terry Riley's "Tread on the Trail" and an excerpt from Philip Glass's Mishima score, performed by the hip sax quartet.. I MET her in a coffee bar on Greenwich Avenue in the Village. It was a typical enough joint for downtown Manhattan, called - somewhat grandiloquently - Cafe des Artistes It had stripped-board floors and distempered walls.
There was a base-to-nape counter, overgrown with pot plants and ballasted with a Gaggia, around which hovered a dwarfish collection of waiting staff. The first room was dark enough, but the second - the one she'd told me she'd meet me in - was almost crepuscular. She'd arrived before me, and arranged herself carefully in a throne-like chair behind a table by the door. She drank sparkling mineral water - although she told me that the food was "excellent" - while I contented myself with small glasses of tart red wine. The talk strayed - as it will between bookish people - to the reputations of writers we have loved and I asked her about Baudelaire Her voice was deep and smoothly throaty She chuckled before replying: "I still love Baudelaire .. I just can't .. y'know ... intellectually I think he's pathetic, but the poetry still holds me." She went on to say that she read him in parallel translation. A seed was sown and finding myself the following day in the Strand Bookstore, just south of Union Square, with its "eight miles" of secondhand books, I went looking for a parallel translation of Les Fleurs du Mal, thinking that maybe now was the time to renew my quest for the poetic. I found a first edition of Edna St Vincent Millay's translations and, idly flipping the cut and annotated pages, chanced on this verse:Hope - if you're hopeful - or despair;Nothing's to hinder you; but hark!Always the hissing head is there,The insupportable remark.It seemed to me a small piece of uncanniness; St Vincent Millay translates the title as "The Fang", but L'Avertisseur really means "the horn", and it's as a foghorn that we perceive this woman, my coffee bar interlocutor; a foghorn blaring out Cassandra-like prophecies of sado-sexual immolation - certainly not as I describe her above, in the guise of a poetry lover, a coffee-bar intellectual, whiling away the early evening in the West Village.Expectations are made to be defeated, and on this trip one was and one wasn't.
I'd expected to turn up at my half-brother Nick Adams's house in upstate New York and have him yawn when I told him why I was in the States; instead, he said "Andrea who?" "Dworkin," I replied, "the radical feminist - surely you've heard of her?" He hadn't - and I suppose this wouldn't be too remarkable if he were a plumber or a farmer, but he's the Professor of Architectural History at Vassar and a widely-read liberal intellectual. That evening he returned from the college almost skipping with glee: "Hardly any of my colleagues have heard of this woman either; a couple of them know of her through her work with a lawyer called Catherine MacKinnon, trying to get anti-pornography legislation enacted - and you say she's well known in Britain - ""Well known?! Her name's almost a synonym for radical feminism.""Well, it isn't here. I mean look" - he brandished a copy of that day's New York Observer, a tittle-tattle broadsheet printed on yellow paper - "see here, the headline reads, "New York feminists stand by their bill not by Broaddrick"; and they've gone round interviewing Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi and Gloria Steinem about their reactions to Juanita Broaddrick's rape accusation against Clinton, but not this Dworkin woman."I grabbed the paper off him. It was true: under a garish cartoon which depicted The Great Cocksman and his entourage of Democratically faithful, bikini-porting feminists, tooling along in a red convertible, there were no fewer than three pieces anatomising the unwillingness of prominent New York feminists to countenance the truth of Broaddrick's accusations. Katrina Vanden Heuvel, the editor of Nation (and believe me, well known over there), summed up the prevailing ennui when she remarked, "Forget Teflon, he's the iridium president. He's like someone from another planet."Most of the women questioned were, I realised, not the sort of "feminists" Andrea Dworkin would have any time for anyway, but Gloria Steinem I knew to be a personal friend. It seemed to me, as the week went on and the strong flows of accusation and counter-accusation continued to course through the American body politic, that I couldn't have chosen a better, nor a potentially more painful time to interview Andrea Dworkin.
For she's the woman who has made it her life's work to counter the way she believes existing power structures enshrine the ability of men to exercise violence on women and sexually abuse them. Furthermore, she's someone who has never hesitated to fuse the personal and the political; adding to this most painful of festschrifts her own accounts of her several sexual assaults, rapes and myriad beatings at the hands of men.I first heard of her when I read her book Intercourse in the early Eighties. It is a searing polemic which advances the proposition that all penetrative sex is freighted with the possibility of being rape. I - as a young man with a more than average obsession with penetrative sex - found the work simultaneously repugnant and beguiling. Repugnant because it forced me to address the basic antinomies of my gender-based sexuality, and beguiling for exactly the same reason. Dworkin's arguments might have been extreme, but they pushed the true agenda to the surface.