Loops 02: Writing & Music

Loops 02

What is Loops? Launched last year, Loops is the collaboration between Faber and Domino Records – two independents who have combined forces with the aim of bringing together the best in music and writing, providing an outlet for longer-form music journalism and an alternative to the dwindling offerings found elsewhere in print form.

Issue One launched last July, and included pieces by Nick Kent, Hari Kunzru, Nick Cave, David Shrigley, Pitchfork’s Amanda Petrusich, to name just a few. We put together a website too – www.loopsjournal.com is the place to go if you only want to read a few extracts. Look out for the link to a free sampler from Domino, and also the link to subscribing via Exact Editions – yours, in digital format, for a year for £9.99.

Enough of the plugging. Loops is co-edited by Faber’s Lee Brackstone and Domino’s Richard King. Below is their Introduction to the second edition, which will give you a flavour of the subsequent 200-plus pages. It’s fair to say that Loops 02 is dominated by Michael Jackson, but there’s space too for the likes of Prince, Serge Gainsbourg, The Cramps, Thom Yorke, and writers of the calibre of Nick Kent, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds. Here’s what they say:

Much, too much, far far too much, has been written about the premature passing of Michael Jackson. King of Pop or King of Plop, aprés Michael le deluge, but it seemed obvious to us that Morley would cut through the hagiographical crap and yet still see the chronic pity of the man at the heart of the myth. We encouraged him to write fearlessly and at length. The essay featured here in issue two of Loops clocks in at 36,000 words and offers perhaps the first sober perspective on those sixty-nine days between Jackson’s death and burial.

Jackson dominates our cover but another diminutive figure is unmistakable. Prince, as Jackson’s immediate peer, rival, sometime nemesis, has unsurprisingly offered no comment on Jackson’s death, his legacy and his posthumous deification. But in his own sweet way Prince has been paying tribute: listening to a bootleg of a recent Paris show some four tracks in we were surprised to hear a loose and happy jam through ‘I Want You Back’ led by Prince on rhythm guitar. A tribute of sorts. But then again, it’s intriguing and amusing to notice Prince doesn’t sing a note of the song himself …

Matt Thorne is engaged in an epic survey of Prince’s thirty-year output (the first of its kind) and the essay featured here examines, uncovers and celebrates a half-decade of lunatic levels of song-writing, producing and performing. In 1983 Jackson shared a stage with Prince for the only time at a James Brown gig at the Apollo (watch it on YouTube). Jackson’s performance is slick and sublime. Prince responds with sick squeals and a guitar solo so awful it has prompted debate about his psychotropic intake at the time.

Perhaps the crowning irony of these parallel, yin-yang careers is that Jackson crumbled and finally expired in preparation for an improbable fifty-night residency at O2. Prince’s legendary twenty-one nights and aftershows in 2007 live on in bootleg form; those looking forward to Jackson’s response must make do with an unspoiled, redeemable-on-eBay-only ticket stub for a show bathetically titled, ‘This is It’.

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