Leaders

Anger Management
Jack Peñate is this generation’s Bob Dylan

Outside where I live, there’s a slightly bent lamp post that projects light into the churchyard opposite. All summer, two junkies camped out in that ghetto park and at night-time, like moths, they would gravitate towards the dim yellow glow to help them locate unruptured veins. I had great fun beaming a toy Bonde do Role laser at them from my bedroom window then hiding.

My street is the boundary line between two London boroughs and that means no one ever clears up the rubbish. There was a shooting round the corner earlier in the year and some Icelandic guy got jumped for no reason. He’s still in a coma.

Last week, the council replaced the slightly bent lamp post. Smack heads, rivers of trash, guns, and they start with the frigging lamp post. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life.

Obviously, I’m doing nothing about this, because it’s 2007 and no one bothers to make a noise about anything. It’s like the Young Knives say in the Features section (“We’ve been taught at school how to be objective in our arguments”), or Foals in our cover story (“The last thing that I want us to do is become a political band”), or even Miss Platnum.

Bur fear not! One man is standing up for the oppressed and downtrodden. Peñate. Jack The Hat himself! With Kate Nash, he’s planning to start a new campaign against the hoody because, cough, people who wear them aren’t very polite. “We’re part of a new generation of young Brits with opinions and something positive to say, rather than using aggression,” he scoffed recently.

And all this from a man who got rumbled writing his name on the wall in a Glasgow nightclub in July and paid up £200 in damages after the owners threatened to call his mum. What a naughty boy.

There is a guy I know who’s pro-active in his rage. Spotting a Hackney Gazette advertising board that inexplicably read, “Ritual child abuse: woman arrested,” then, “Cute kids 2007, see inside for entry coupon,” he flipped and emailed the editor: “What the fuck were you thinking!? No really, WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING!?” But he’s German and it only takes his computer to crash before he goes completely nutso.

Suburban Relapse
In the hands of Siouxsie Sioux, punk rock ist tot

Wire’s Colin Newman has got a point when he says, “My generation, the punk generation, are a bunch of fucking tossers,” on page 26. These new Sex Pistols reunion shows are awkward to say the least, and what the hell happened to Siouxsie Sioux? If you’re reading this in order you won’t have got to it yet, but Mark Fernyhough’s most amusing review of her recent gig in Berlin in Sports (“Siouxsie Berlin show so awful punter attempts to stab half the audience”) makes for depressing reading. You expect and enjoy diva-like behaviour from Mariah Carey, other R&B queens and global mega-stars like Prince, but our own humble Siouxsie?

Pigeon snapper Heike Schneider-Matzigkeit managed to get a good shot of Siouxsie to go with the review. All credit to Heike, because Sioux didn’t exactly make things easy. Photographers had to fire off rounds from the crowd, and then they were supposed to sign some crazy contract before they were allowed to do anything with their own intellectual property. An excerpt for your reading pleasure: “In consideration of the payment of the sum of £1 (the receipt and sufficiency of which is hereby acknowledged), Siouxsie Sioux grants permission for any of the APPROVED images of herself, taken by the above named person to be used for NON COMMERCIAL use in named photographer’s personal portfolio and named publication(s) only.”

Another one: “Siouxsie Sioux retains reciprocal rights for the use of the photographs.” And: “Siouxsie Sioux has 100% approval of any image taken at the above concert. All images should be submitted for approval within seven days of the performance.”
Absolute madness. It’s the death of DIY culture. And naturally we’ve paid precisely no attention to her demands and run the picture without her goddess-like blessing. Come and get us Aunty Sue! We owe you a quid.

Bumpy Ride
Feel sympathy for the hip hop star who gets arrested in a crap car

Back in the long-forgotten but oh-so-sweet days when I used to have a car, I interviewed a medium-level US hip hop artist who owned a monstrous SUV. “You got a ride?” he asked during our meeting. “You bet: ’83 Honda Civic, bucket of rust and slow as a snail,” I replied.

The weird thing was, he chose to ignore what I said and tell me instead about how kids in Long Beach, California spruce up those old flat-backed Hondas and race them. I had, in other words, a phat motor in his eyes and the implication was clear: if the two of us were gonna roll together for an afternoon with any success, I needed to have a strict machine. But I didn’t. I had a hunk of shit with a loose valve in the engine.

Imagine, then, what utter horror was expressed on hip hop message boards when poor Philly rapper Beanie Sigel got arrested for not paying a car rental bill in October. That he’d broken the law didn’t bother anyone. That the unpaid bill related to a modest Nissan Altima sent shockwaves through the entire rap world. “2007 Nissan Altima?!? Rented?!? WTF! World coming to tha end… rapper driving a rented Nissan,” wrote shynebb4life on allhiphop.com, to which jaeda added: “This nigga Beanie rented an Altima when he talks about pushing a Bentley???? Wow!!! The nigga could at least have rented a Caddy truck or something.”

And, after the surprise, justification. “Everyone knows rappers use ‘laylow’ vehicles on different occasions,” pointed out HoodProphet, wisely. “I wouldn’t get the ducks quacking on this one yet. Probably even had somebody in his fam pushing it.” Mak: “Nigga prolly hardly ever used that shit… prolly forgot he rented that shit in the first place with all the purple haze n shit.” Shyeem: “lol at people thinkin b. sigel broke… saw the dude plenty of times this summer pushin a black maserati thru the hood. god damn yall quick to throw people under the bus.”

The message to this story is clear: if you’re in the game and you’re gonna get busted, for the love of Jesus make sure you’re pushing a Benz.

Fleet Foxes

The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

The Stool Pigeon issue 14, December 2007

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