BJÖRN MAGNUSSON
Nightclub Music & Ethereal Faith
(Specter Fix Press)
Right. I know I have an enormous concrete chip on my poor aching left shoulder. It reminds me that the world is unfair. It doesn’t allow for artistic excellence or beauty. It has a life of its own, it is a bloodhound sniffing out privilege and insisting I don’t let its existence pass without comment. This cunt lives in a concrete silo in Switzerland! He can afford to fly in musos from America in order to satisfy his vanity publishing New York album. He’s good looking and manages to look casually correct bare foot in a photo while not on holiday, and that is always a tell-tale sign. I’m telling you, Bjorn (fuck them two little dots) is loaded.
And I don’t believe him. New York is insanely clean for the rich and still shit for the poor. Yes, I’m judging him, based on the slimmest evidence. But… my bloodhound chip. New York. Pah. Jack Kerouac knew he was faking it eighty years ago when he went a-slumming as a Columbia student. So did Ginsberg. But they brought something new to the world. This album is just Patti Smith band pastiche. In the hope that he will be mistaken for Serge Gainsbourg. Who invented. Was an inventor.
Just swigging brandy and smoking Gauloise whilst singing does not make you a louche jetsetter. Amanda Lear won’t be interested. CBGBs is a clothes store. Lou Reed is dead but there isn’t a Swiss sized hole to fill where he was. The past is a pool of urine in an alley, blood spurts swirling like oil, waiting for an outsider artist to stumble and drop a piece of cardboard over it. That cardboard is for sale in the gallery adjacent to the alley. You can’t afford it. Bjorn can.
Not to be totally mean, great curating. Stick musicians like that over two chords for five minutes and something will happen and it does. But, that’s not enough. C’mon Bjorn tell me something about yourself. NYC is all about honesty, reinvention, raw bullshit. Sore throats. Breaking things. Lou Reed’s notebooks in the MOMA, FFS.
But overall, I quite like it, in a, if I’d discovered it in a bargain bin with pressing date as 1979 on oil embargo thin vinyl and one of those shiny sleeves featuring someone in a slung jacket, proto-mullet combo, kind of way. Quite like it. Don’t believe it.
