etnobofin

It seems that recent thoughts have been tape-recordings going around on a loop. For the past few weeks, my Twitter feed has pretty much been variations on two messages:

@etnobofin “Holy crap my French sucks. Gee it’s really hard getting back into the language again.”
@etnobofin “Wow, I’m living in France again. I’m going off to do [insert apparently- typically-French-activity here] just because I bloody can.”

So yeah, apologies for that. But while we’re repeating ourselves, lets say again that Lewis Taylor is a genius and why do so few people know of his music? His fan page on Facebook has just 153 members. Lilly Allen has freaking 1,000, and she’s not even any good. (Of course it could be that most Lewis Taylor fans have too much good sense and taste to be signed up to Facebook.)

Lewis Taylor fandom is marked by gushing, verbose enthusiasm and simmering rage that nobody else “gets” Taylor’s music. Ernest Hardy’s article on Taylor from LA Weekly in March 2007 is a good example. Here’s his typically ebullient description of the song Leader of the Band.

“[Taylor's music] turns you into art, freeing your imagination to fly. “The Leader of the Band” … is an air-swept melody, full of breezy harmonies with drawn-out oohs and ahhs and sideways bah-bah-bahs. It’s on an unapologetic ’60s tip. It trips the trigger between sound and memory, allowing one’s private reserve of mental imagery to tumble forth, rather than some choreographed music-video shit. For me, it conjures that smiling, sated morning-after feeling of watching an underwear-clad lover eat a bowl of cereal, morning sunlight fracturing through a naked window.”

Well, yes, exactly.

Also in Lewis Taylor news, Markleslie99 has made a nice new video for Everybody Here Wants You – a mashup using copyright-free Betty Boop cartoons, which is a really nice idea. Unfortunately embedding has been disabled on the vid, so you have to follow this link.

So there. I’ve repeated myself again about Lewis Taylor’s genius, so now I’m off to eat couscous, because I’m in France and I can.