Tag: Music

Sometimes all you want is a medley of the hits, right? 

While foraging at the groovy local record emporium last weekend, I stumbled across a CD single I’d never seen by Prince, Purple Medley. I snatched it up instantly, because I’m a sucker for the cheesy medleys, and a medley of Prince’s golden era is not to be missed. 

OK, I’ll admit – medleys sit at the bottom of the ladder of musical melding, while a little higher up there’s remixes and at the top, skilled sampling. Medleys are the Cousin Oliver or Poochie of pop music, bastard children that nobody really respects. Yet there is a party-down energy to a good medley, which at its best feels like a song of “all good bits” and no boring bits. Medleys are proudly basic – a chorus bashing into another refrain slipping into a good drum solo, with little layering or dissection. 

On Purple Medley there’s goofy fun in hearing “Little Red Corvette” push into the sultry chorus for “Cream,” or the raunchy opening power guitar chords of “Batdance” swerve into the bouncy intro to “When Doves Cry.” It never replaces the Olympian Prince originals, of course, but sometimes all you want is a medley.  

You can’t think “medley” without going past the kitschy world of Stars On 45, the Dutch tinkerers who used knock-off soundalikes to bash out a stew of Beatles ’n’ disco ’n’ Star Wars and much more in the early 1980s. In that distant pre-internet age, such repurposing of well-loved hits felt a bit startling, like a glimpse of the future. It wasn’t much fancier than splicing, but a good medley always carried an element of surprise. 

I always dug Weird Al’s delirious silly “polka medleys” on his albums slapping together a half-dozen or so hits into a crazed Looney Tunes-style joy ride, and I’ll admit, guiltily, to playing Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers’ eminently dopey cassette single for “Swing The Mood” an awful lot back in the day. Jive Bunny turned canned nostalgia into a brief viral sensation by giving old chestnuts like “Rock Around The Clock”, “Tutti Frutti” and Glenn Miller a hip-hop spin. It’s music as party wallpaper, no depth required. 

I won’t argue these are great art, and in fact a lot of the times they’re just awful. But other times, the  appeal of the medley is hearing the bits you know spliced and diced into something new.

It’s not really the same as sampling, which actually is an art form – the bits are shattered into many smaller shards in a sample, chopped up so far that they become building blocks for something new. A lot of great music has been created from the once-maligned art of sampling, from the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique to J Dilla to DJ Shadow to The Avalanches and many more. The samplers take it further, but the medley-making mix masters like Jive Bunny are all about sticking to the surface, cutting and pasting a collage of all the things you already know. 

To my embarrassment, I dabbled in splicing together medleys myself for a spell my freshman year of college – in between the drunken escapades and studying I sometimes found myself playing around with my old-school double tape deck and CD player, painstakingly pressing “record” and “stop” again and again to put together a just-for-me melange of clips from my tape and CD collection of Depeche Mode, cartoon sound effects, Men At Work, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Prince, Aerosmith, Robert Plant’s “Tall Cool One,” Iron Maiden, quotable bits of movies and TV shows all mashed up with excerpts from dire “comedy” cassettes my teen friends and I made. 

I spent an awful lot of hours in that weird time pressing “stop” and “record” to slap together a half-dozen or so silly medleys, but to me at the time, it felt kind of comforting to see the pieces of my past in new ways. I could see the appeal of getting inside sounds. 

Medleys are hacked together for sheer consumerism but sometimes they can feel like a bit of accidental art. Prince didn’t have a thing to do with putting together “Purple Medley” far as I can tell, but it’s still all about echoes of his art. And of course, a medley doesn’t erase the original songs.

One could even argue that it’s a heir of William S. Burroughs’ “cut up” techniques of random art generation, with Jive Bunny part of a long line of iconoclastic innovators. 

…Or maybe not. Perhaps I’m just basic in my occasional need for a medley. But y’know, that “Purple Medley” is pretty darned cool.

Still sticking up for Phil Collins after all these years

Musical tastes change with age, I get it. But no matter how cool you think you get, the stuff you loved when you were 14 years old will always be your secret love.

So it is with me and Phil Collins, whose best work I’ve always got time for, no matter how much other stuff I listen to. 

Phil’s third and best solo album No Jacket Required came out 40 years ago this year, and 1985 really was the peak of Phil-mania or Collins-palooza, whatever you want to call it. The guy was everywhere for a year or so there. And boy, some people hated that. Not me. 

In the summer of 1985, I nerdily rocked out to Genesis’ later albums with Phil and company and the gloriously cheesy video to “Don’t Lose My Number.” There was something about the best of Phil’s songs that excited me – perhaps it was the way Phil’s sincere voice always made everything sound so darned dramatic, or his drummer’s sense of rhythm pushing along the tunes. 

I wouldn’t classify Phil as an innovator, but when it came to pop hooks, the man could cook. That unforgettable drum burst with “In The Air Tonight,” the melodramatic urgency of “Don’t Lose My Number”’s chorus, the soaring keyboard riff that opens the banger Philip Bailey duet “Easy Lover.” Even the annoyingly catchy chorus of “Sussudio,” a song folks love to hate, is a bona fide earworm of amiable gibberish. 

I think what struck me all those years ago on MTV was Collins’ seeming normalcy in the heart of pop stardom. Balding and ordinary, he was the odd man out against flashier, more innovative stars like Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson or Springsteen. He wore Members Only jackets and had a mullet. He’s a history nerd who collected Alamo relics. He felt relatable. I’d never be a George Michael, but maybe I could be a Phil. 

And even though I’m a diehard Peter Gabriel fan until the end, I’ll quietly under my breath admit that when it comes to Genesis, I kind of listen to the radio-friendly Phil years more than I do the proggy Gabriel era. Listening to the vaguely proggy Abacab at a church ski camp felt slightly subversive. And none-more-’80s blockbuster “Invisible Touch” for the win, man. 

Unfortunately there’s a kind of weakness in Collins’ work that only increased with age – his tendency for mawkish ballads. His solo albums tended to be a mix of ballads and rockers – some very good ballads too, like “Against All Odds” or “Take Me Home”, but somewhere around the unfortunately foreshadowing album But Seriously… Phil got more sappy and less sassy, singing about poverty and apartheid instead of Sussudios. 

By 1993’s Both Sides album he slipped mostly into bland soft-rock territory and the hooks of his grand early solo run faded away. He left Genesis and did Disney movie soundtracks and kind of like Billy Joel, he left the work that made him famous for different territories. 

These days he’s basically retired at age 74 – Collins’ health has been notoriously poor the last few years, a lifetime of hardcore drumming catching up with him. Recent reunion tours saw him sitting down the whole show. 

Still, from Face Value through that 40-year-old banger No Jacket Required, Phil Collins was an unlikely arena-filling superstar. And I have to admit a little bit of my love for classic Phil is sticking up for the underdog. Collins became a bit of a piñata for critical beatings over the years, even with “In the Air Tonight” becoming a classic across generations. Even in his breezy autobiography Going Back, you get the sense he sees himself as a little unappreciated. 

Listening to Phil grounds me and reminds me that sometimes it’s just about whether or not the music moves you, not what the in crowd says. Even though I don’t listen to a lot of today’s pop – sorry, I’m still agnostic on the Taylor Swift question – my Phil-fandom means I try not to sneer at anyone else’s tastes too hard. If you like it, you like it. 

Collins’ songs didn’t change the world, but I also can never quite entirely get them out of my head. For a musician, that’s not the worst legacy to leave. I’m too old to care about being cool now, so I’ll listen to Phil Collins sometimes and bang my head to “Easy Lover” like it was 1985 all over again. 

And if you don’t like that, you can Sussudio right off, eh? 

The best image ever taken of Phil Collins in concert, 1981

I’m losing my edge, but I was there: My top albums of 2005

Gaze with me back into the misty reaches of time to a year called 2005, when I was thinking of buying a fancy device called an iPod, where we all thought George W Bush was the worst President ever, the pope had just died and Christian Bale debuted a gritty new take on Batman. We’re at least two Batmans along now on the sliding scale of time, but everything old is new again, ain’t it? 

I mark 2005 as just about the time when I got a little less intensely involved in following all the hip cool new music trends out there – I’d just had a kid, which instantly makes you less cool, and the internet hadn’t quite exploded into a tsunami of content no one person can absorb. While I still try to keep up with what goes on for the youths, I’m well aware I’m a middle-aged white dude and the tastemakers aren’t me. 

Yet, 20 years on, it feels like 2005 was a very good year for the bustling world of indie rock and music – acts like Queens of the Stone Age and Fiona Apple built on their earlier success, quirky pop music was having a moment and singer-songwriters were blazing some new ground with the work of Mountain Goats and Sufjan Stevens. 

So, here’s my 10 fave records to pull up on the ol’ iPod from 2005, and while popular music is always an ever-moving target, many of these songs still feel pretty vital today in our increasingly fractured world. 

ANOHNI (as Antony and the Johnsons), I Am A Bird Now – The soaring voice of the transgender musician now known as Anohni is one of the most evocative in music, and this heartbreaking album by her earlier band is still dazzling chamber pop, rich with love and loss.

Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine – Apple has been determined to follow her own muse, and this album saw her truly embracing her own vision after her earlier flirtations with MTV stardom. Filled with confidence, she sets out her own jazz-influenced territory, channeling influences from Joni Mitchell to Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, and dares us to take it all in. 

LCD Soundsystem, self-titled – James Murphy’s dance-rock project zipped through the culture like a comet but their first album remains their best, combining hipster self-parody in “Losing My Edge” with joyful anthems like “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House.” The arch coolness of their work would eventually lose its novelty, but man, I was there, at the start of it. 

Mountain Goats, Sunset Tree – For “This Year” alone, this album deserves a slot in the 2005 pantheon. John Darnielle’s fragile, gorgeous songs delve into his abusive childhood, but makes it a universal concept album about powerlessness, hope and gathering the strength to move on. 

New Pornographers, Twin Cinema – This all-star group of indie musicians with a kind of terrible name includes Neko Case, AC Newman and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar crafting wonderful power-pop. This is their finest set, which plays like a greatest hits collection for a band you’ve never heard before – an upbeat, melodic group of songs that bounces comfortably between each of the members’ distinctive voices. 

Of Montreal, The Sunlandic Twins – The loosely defined Elephant 6 Collective of psychedelic pop bands had a moment, and of Montreal was always my favourite of them – eccentric, inventive swirling sounds filled with hooks. Like a lot of bands of the time they were insanely prolific and not always great at quality control, but the one-two punch of The Sunlandic Twins and 2007’s Hissing Fauna were their finest hour, with frontman Kevin Barnes’ keen, chameleon voice guiding you down his own very peculiar musical highways. 

The Phoenix Foundation, Pegasus – This New Zealand band’s gorgeous melancholy came together nicely in their second album for a series of atmospheric, wandering songs that feel laidback, yet tense with subtext. It gets more and more rewarding with each listen. 

Queens of the Stone Age, Lullabies to Paralyze – I sometimes feel like QotSA are the last great rock band, left from a time when stoners ruled the earth. Their pounding desert rock coalesces here into a pounding haze of riffs that broods and pummels away. If I had long hair still, I’d be headbanging to this one, which still stands out in Josh Homme’s stellar career. 

Spoon, Gimme Fiction – Spoon never quite became the big name they deserved to be, as alternative rock faded from the zeitgeist, but their attitude-drenched sound had a delicious energy, and this album, packed with swaggering nuggets like “I Turn My Camera On” and “Sister Jack”, holds up well. 

Sufjan Stevens, Illinois – Stevens’ voice, always so delicate, takes us on a concept album through the American midwest, but his ultimate subject is always the fragile human heart. Layering on orchestras, show tunes, baroque pop and gentle ballads, it’s a remarkable album that feels like it covers more than just one state, but the promise and peril of America itself in its songs. It may be 20 years old now, but it’s still pretty timeless stuff.

I didn’t appreciate Bruce Springsteen until I left America

For a long time, Bruce Springsteen was seen as American as apple pie and waving flags – with all the good and bad that entails. 

I considered myself too cool for Bruce for an awful long time, and it was really only after I moved to New Zealand nearly 20 years ago that I started to get what he was really all about. 

The thing is, I came of age when Bruce was in peak “Born In The USA” stardom, a swaggering figure in tight blue jeans who felt, well, kind of cheesy during a time when I was more into the sexy pulses of Prince or the inescapable Michael Jackson (yes, I have regrets there). Springsteen, somehow, felt like dad rock to me.

The problem was, Born In The USA the album and song did too well, and Springsteen’s image got solidified in that early MTV age as the all-American troubadour dancing in front of an American flag, no matter how much his lyrics indicated otherwise. Springsteen hit that rare peak stardom when what the entertainer is actually singing about matters less than their place as a cultural signifier, where who they are is less important than what they represent. 

It’s amazing that 40+ years on, people still mishear “Born In The USA” as some swaggering anthem of Yankee superiority. Heck, I did too for way too long. 

With “Born In The USA,” all many people heard is the chorus, without realising how much of a sad hopeful wail it was. It’s about American dreams and the darkness behind them. Heck, how could a song with lyrics like “Got in a little hometown jam / So they put a rifle in my hand / Sent me off to a foreign land / To go and kill the yellow man” ever be interpreted as some patriotic anthem?

But in America, image – and surface – is everything.

I wouldn’t say I disliked Bruce, but just felt he was a little uncool for a hip young fellow to be listening to as I delved into Depeche Mode and The Cure fandom. His work is very short on ironic detachment and long on sincerity – virtues I value more now than I once did. I did like the spooky atmospherics of “Tunnel of Love,” or the nifty twang he gave to the chorus on “Lucky Town,” and the very first time I finally heard “The River,” I realised Springsteen was a writer who could sum up an awful lot in a few short verses: 

“Now all them things that seemed so important / Well, mister, they vanished right into the air / Now I just act like I don’t remember / And Mary acts like she don’t care”

Springsteen’s work has always been about speaking truth and he continues to do so to this day, blasting the current man in the White House relentlessly,  no matter how the beer-swilling “Bruuuuuce” fans shout back. It might seem funny to call a millionaire rock star pretty courageous for doing that, but these days, courage is in short supply on the American scene. 

It took me far too long to delve deeply into Springsteen’s impressive discography, and realise how much he’s always been about challenging the American dream instead of idealising it. 

I cracked into Bruce Springsteen’s mammoth new box set on the weekend, Tracks II, which compiles a whopping seven unreleased albums from the Boss over his prolific career. (So far, the gem is the spooky, drum loop driven songs in The Streets of Philadelphia Sessions). The bounty of this set once again reminded me of how much broader Springsteen’s message has been than the pumping chorus of “Born In The USA.” 

America is so into its own mythology and mythmaking. The perils of that can be seen in the news every single day now. Sometimes I’m amazed by how chill and self-effacing New Zealand generally is by comparison.

The thing is, no matter what you might think of the USA these days, “Born In The USA” is still a great song, maybe because it carries within it all the contradictions and hopes of a country that has never quite been as great as it likes to imagine it could be.

I haven’t lived in America for an awful long time now, but listening to Bruce Springsteen always seems to evoke the open-hearted good times I had there and the promise and potential that so often falls short. I don’t really mark the Fourth of July down here any more but if I do, it’ll be by listening to some Springsteen.

‘Still, I have the warmth of the sun’ – RIP to Brian Wilson

Brian Wilson’s music felt like the sound of America – beautiful, optimistic, full of big dreams and more than a little sad sometimes.

Beach Boys founder and principal songwriter Wilson died today at 82, after a career that changed American pop music and the world. 

I was very glad to see Brian Wilson perform his classic album Pet Sounds in Auckland at the Civic in 2016 in what turned out to be his final show in Aotearoa. Then in his early 70s, he was fragile and seemed a bit off in his own reality, but he played those songs and gamely sang along the best he could (of course, the younger band members took those high falsetto notes). 

We loved Brian, that night, simply for showing up and for all that his music represents. Backed by a crack band, he sat at the piano for most of the show and the audience banter was mostly left to fellow ex-Beach Boy Al Jardine. But for anyone who made it there that night, it was a rare glimpse at genius. A nod and a smile from Brian Wilson felt like the sun breaking through clouds. 

I admit, I took a while to warm up to the Beach Boys, who seemed inescapably cheesy when I was growing up in the 1980s, when their only songs you heard were the incredibly catchy and annoying ‘Kokomo’ from Tom Cruise’s movie Cocktail and a painful duet of ‘Wipe Out’ with novelty rap trio The Fat Boys. 

But then, something clicked after I listened to The Beach Boys’ landmark 1966 album Pet Sounds several times. Brian Wilson led the group’s transformation from singing about sand, girls and cars to the existential yearning of ‘God Only Knows.’ 

The charming harmonies of their earlier frothier work were still there, but instead of surfin’ and chicks, Wilson’s gorgeous tunes like ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ ‘Caroline, No’ and ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ tapped into some more elemental form of longing. The glossy surface of the best Beach Boys songs hid a world of emotion beneath. Why isn’t life as perfect as we dream it should be, and how do we survive it all? 

After Pet Sounds, Wilson became lost in a fog of drug use, collapsing mental health and creative frustration. The Beach Boys long-delayed album Smile became his waterloo, “lost” and never officially released until it finally came out in several versions years later. 

Wilson battled mental health problems and the trauma from an abusive childhood in an era where help wasn’t easy to get, where you were just told to toughen up and stop your moaning.

Still, Wilson came back from some incredible lows to perform and write again. He got back up, made it here to Auckland in his 70s and still was able to sing those songs about surf, girls and the inner workings of the heart. 

The early Beach Boys song ‘In My Room’ is a gorgeous melody, but in those lyrics – “In this world I lock out / All my worries and my fears / In my room” – they summed up how all of us feel on our bad days, and our hopes for a better tomorrow. 

The Beach Boys weren’t quite as godlike as the Beatles, as dangerous as the Rolling Stones or as groovy as Sly and the Family Stone. Yet their music changed the world by selling that quintessential California optimism worldwide – surf culture everywhere, including New Zealand, would never quite be the same. But it was also selling Wilson’s more subtle messages, of working with your mental health and of finding peace in a complicated life. 

The 1960s saw American optimism start to crack for the first time, in ways we’re still seeing echoes of today. The Beach Boys were never revolutionary, but the best of their songs told us it was OK to sing about your feelings, to admit you were scared and to look for the beauty where you could find it. “Still, I have the warmth of the sun,” Wilson sang in another one of those songs about a girl who left him. There’s always sunshine somewhere. 

It’s been a bad week for music, with the death of Wilson and Sly Stone, two troubled twin dreamers who spun timeless songs out of the chaotic 1960s. Both men dazzled with their talent but spent years isolated and dealing with their own demons. 

I’m an agnostic, but I still like to think that somewhere out there in the cosmos right now Brian Wilson and Sly Stone are sitting there hanging out together writing the best song of all time, and maybe, just maybe, it’s the one we’ll all get to hear one day at the moment our own time comes.

Wouldn’t it be nice? 

Review: The Sex Pistols, Auckland Town Hall, 2 April

The Sex Pistols perform at Auckland Town Hall, March, 2025.
@yeatesey

I did say a while back that 2025 is my year of punk rock and so it’s proved. So I couldn’t pass up seeing one of the first and best punk acts of all time, or at least 75% of the founding members.

It may be 50 years after they first formed, but I finally got a chance to catch The Sex Pistols live with frontman Frank Carter. Turns out it was a punk rock delight!

Here’s my review over at Radio New Zealand:

The Sex Pistols at Auckland Town Hall prove punk is not dead

Anarchy!!

Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 – Free sample 3!

Hey, it’s your weekly reminder I’ve got a new book out! For the release of my new collection of the so-called ‘best’ of 30 years of journalism, Clippings, every Monday in March I’m spotlighting one of the more than 100 pieces by me gathered up in this hefty tome. I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99! 

This one actually comes from right here on this here website back in the long-ago days of 2021. It’s a sample of the ‘Criticism’ section of the book which gathers up piles of pop culture ruminations I’ve done over the years. Inexplicably, this post about Yoko Ono remains one of the most popular I’ve ever done. I’d flatter myself it’s about the quality of my prose, but more likely because I put Yoko Ono and ‘sorry’ in the headline and it’s hitting some Google sweet spot. Sorry, Yoko haters, but this isn’t a piece about Yoko Ono being sorry she broke up the Beatles!

Why I’m sorry I ever laughed at Yoko Ono

Read it right here!

You’ll find this piece and far, far more collecting 30 years of journalism in my new book Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024. Order it today, baby needs a new pair of shoes!

Hello, I wrote a book, and it’s only taken me 30 years

Greetings! I wrote a book. Well, I’ve actually been writing it for about 30 years, believe it or not. Introducing Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024, a hefty compendium of my columns, essays, feature profiles and much more over the course of my so-called career!

I’ve written an awful lot of words over the years, but I wanted to put together something that was a little more permanent than a bunch of yellowing newspapers and broken website links. Clippings is, much like many journalism careers, an eclectic mix, from long features to blog posts to deeply personal essays to in-depth pop culture criticism, spanning from Mississippi to California to New York City to New Zealand. 

From interviewing governors and rock stars to climbing active volcanos and adjusting to life on the other side of the world, this book is me saying, “Hey, I was here, and this is some of what I did along the way.” Doesn’t everyone want to say that at some point about their life’s work, whatever it is? Throw it all together, and it’s probably as close to a sort of autobiography as I’ll ever get.

It’s got many of my works from long-ago newspapers and magazines, websites and even some fine pieces from this very website in a handsome curated form sure to be adored by your family for generations.

I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99! 

Get it here: Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 by Nik Dirga 

Concert review: Amyl and the Sniffers, The Powerstation, Auckland, February 16

So on Saturday evening I somehow did an Old Man Thing (TM) and put my back out, or nearly out, to the point where I was kind of afraid to move lest my spine shatter into a million delicate pieces. 

And top of my mind was “Oh crap, I hope I can still go to the Amyl and the Sniffers concert Sunday night!”

Fortunately for your hero, a bucket of painkillers and super-hot bath helped and I hobbled into the sold-out Powerstation for the Aussie punk act’s final sold-out New Zealand show. And after 90 minutes or so of amped-up feminist punk anthems and cautiously staying well away from the heaving mosh pit, lo and behold, I felt healed. (OK, I was still a little sore. But you get the picture.)

The Melbourne band has been kicking around for 7-8 years now but really broken through with their excellent 2024 album Cartoon Darkness, and the very NSFW single “Jerkin” which slams toxic masculinity in a grandly profane fashion. 

Watching frontwoman Amy Carter and the band stomp, bounce and shimmy through their propulsive catalog, I kept thinking, “This band should be a household name.” Maybe they will be soon – they’ve got the talent, and the fuck-the-system ethos that 2025 is desperately calling out for. Amy is a whirlwind of motion on stage, bouncing, sticking her tongue out and gobbing a bit in the time-honoured punk fashion, tossing her blond hair around and climbing up the speakers. She has true star power and it’s easy to imagine she’s just at the start of where she’ll go. “How you f—in’ doing?” she asked several times, and we were doing fine. 

Facebook: Amyl and the Sniffers

Punk still somehow has the bad rap of being angry and violent, but it felt inclusive, particularly important coming the same weekend when a bunch of thug so-called “Christians” violently disrupted Auckland Pride events.

For “Me and the Girls,” Amy welcomed on stage a random chorus of audience members of all shapes and sizes and it felt bloody celebratory. Amyl and the Sniffers’ tense anthem about violence about women, “Knifey,” struck a chord with never-ending misogyny still everywhere you look, while poppy nuggets like “Chewing Gum” and “U Should Not Be Doing That” marry plentiful hooks with a bit of throbbing anarchy.

I wrote more about punk (and Amyl) not too long ago and if anything, the vibe has gotten even more spirit of 1977 in my headspace lately. What a joy, then, to see Amy take the stage with swagger and anger, but also, kindness. Her first words to the audience were if you see someone fall in the mosh pit, pick them up, and don’t touch anyone who doesn’t want to be touched. Don’t be a jerk. It shouldn’t be that hard.

It was a show full of joyful rage against the cartoon darkness we’re all living through. I thought a bit about one of my favourite writers, Tom Robbins, who died just last week at age 92, and his mantra: “My personal motto has always been: Joy in spite of everything.”

There was joy at Amy and the Sniffers Sunday night, in spite of everything. Even my back. 

A couple other great reviews by people who are not me:

Chris Schulz at Boiler Room

The 13th Floor

Emma Gleason at the NZ Herald

Facebook: Amyl and the Sniffers

Bob Dylan is a complete unknown, and that’s the point

One of the secrets of Bob Dylan’s success is his enduring mystery. Dylan has forged a 60-year career out of being opaque, inscrutable…. a “complete unknown,” if you will.

I’ll admit, I’m kind of a sucker for rock star musical biopics, even when they’re terrible. I watched Elvis and Walk The Line and Bohemian Rhapsody and I embrace the cheesy “rags to riches to overdose” narrative of such films, even when my head admits they’re not always great movies.

A Complete Unknown is a deep dive into Bob Dylan’s early years that does its share of romanticising and mythologising… but then again, hasn’t Dylan himself been doing that since he was a kid? For me, it hit the spot by embracing the many mysteries of Bob, revelling in music biopic cliches while being just prickly enough to feel real.

Timothée Chalamet is really far too pretty to be young Bob, who had a reedy, squinty babyface, but he nicely summons up the keen intelligence, peculiar charisma and somewhat mercenary ethics of young Bobby. Dylan rode into New York from rural Minnesota pretending to be everything from a hobo to a carnival worker. He threw aside his birth name of Zimmerman and became a kind of perpetual musical sponge, absorbing everything and synthesising it into something kind of new. 

A Complete Unknown is about the birth of an artist who’s also a magpie, a wry cynic and also kind of a genius who’s not really a very nice guy. Dylan is called an “asshole” a couple of times in the film, which thankfully doesn’t try to show him as some kind of saintly hero. We avoid some big teary monologue where Bob Dylan reveals all the dark secrets that motivate him.

This exchange is as close as A Complete Unknown gets to peeking behind the mask: “Everyone asks where these songs come from, Sylvie. But then you watch their faces, and they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why the songs didn’t come to them.“

Chalamet’s natural teen idol charm is cleverly subverted just enough to make his Dylan feel like an echo of the thin wild mercury sound of the man himself. (And while he doesn’t sound exactly like Dylan singing, he sounds close enough to make it work, and lipsynching Dylan would’ve been even weirder.)

A Complete Unknown takes the great Bob Dylan creation myth and hits all the beats – his turn from folk music to electric, his wry confidence, his thorny romance with Joan Baez, his worship of Woody Guthrie. The movie follows Dylan from his arrival in New York as an eager kid up through his explosion into stardom in the mid ‘60s, and its big emotional turn is in Dylan’s moving from stark and preachy folk into raw and raucous rock, culminating in his famously defiant “electric” performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

A Complete Unknown wrings Dylan’s transformation for a lot of drama that might seem a bit hokey from 2025 eyes – so he’s playing an electric guitar now, so what? – but it’s worth remembering that Dylan’s “betrayal” of folk was a big deal back in the day. (Ed Norton‘s marvellous supporting turn as folkie Pete Seeger really captures the man’s uniquely kind heart and endearing dorkiness.)

As anyone who’s dipped their toes into the vast waters of Dylanology knows, there’s an infinite number of Bobs in the Dylanverse. (At least 80, as I painstakingly rambled on about a few years ago!) There’s no way A Complete Unknown, which follows a fairly basic biopic blueprint, could satisfy everyone, and we’ve certainly got cinema bizarro like Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There or Bob-starring oddities like Masked And Anonymous to fill any taste. 

Watching Martin Scorcese’s superb documentary No Direction Home again recently, which follows Dylan’s 1966 tour of Britain in some dazzlingly vibrant footage, I was struck by how angry many of the British fans interviewed at the time were with Dylan’s new style. “I think he’s prostituting himself,” one barks. Yet to my eyes now, the hyper electric Dylan of 1966 is quite possibly his finest era. God only knows what would’ve happened if social media existed at the time.

Unknown works for me because it never quite pretends to be definitive, and knows there’s many more alternate Bob stories to be told. But hey, it’s turning new audiences on to Dylan music, got a bunch of Oscar nods, and is a reminder that after nearly 84 years walking this Earth, there’s still nobody quite like him. 

Is it 100% true? It’s pretty and darned entertaining, but perhaps its biggest success is in carefully keeping Bob Dylan’s true motivations a complete unknown.