Niklas's thoughts

The album cover of The Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat.

Episode 164: “White Light/White Heat” by the Velvet Underground

Andrew Hickey is the name of a person who should be hailed. He is the creator and the host of the podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. The fact that most of the podcast is freely available to all is truly fucking wonderful.

He made an episode about The Velvet Underground's song 'White Light/White Heat'. The episode is over three hours and twenty minutes long. It's 'about' a song that's not even three minutes long.

OK, that's an exaggeration in the extreme. Let me explain what makes the episode singular.

First, every episode of the podcast is focused around a specific song, but it's not only about the song; it's about the times in which it was made, the people, the surroundings, politics, philosophies, religion, etc. I made it sound boring, but it's fucking not.

Second, this episode contains so much music from sources other than the Velvet Underground's own shit. It's required listening! La Monte Young? LA MONTE YOUNG! I had no idea who the dude was until i heard this episode and it's fucking WARPED! The music he made and still makes!? Wow. WOW. Drones that intertwine and go on forever, that's him. Shit.

John Cage. JOHN CAGE: the composer, the mystic, the oracle-led genius who was afraid of old ideas. Wow.

I won't go on like I'm more insane than I actually am, so I'll stop soon.

In my head, what makes the song such a fucking riot is that it's kind of slow, kind of sounds like the instruments are played by beginners, and then it deteriorates while it elevates into becoming one of the true rock 'n' roll figureheads. This is garage rock, this is rock 'n' roll, this is three chords and the truth, this is non-CIS sexuality by a band who released their song 'Heroin' when The Beatles released 'Can't Buy Me Love'. Holy shit, The Velvet Underground were truly great.

After two minutes, 'White Light/White Heat' goes somewhere else; the bass. The bass! The guitar mangles?! The background sweat! Shit, this song says so much.

And to think of it, the song opens the album White Light/White Heat. The song is followed up by 'The Gift', a song that's over eight minutes long.

The stereo version of the song starts with the music mainly in the right channel. The left channel starts with a story being told by John Cale:

Waldo Jeffers had reached his limit
It was now mid-August, which meant he had been separated from Marsha for more than two months
Two months, and all he had to show was three dog-eared letters and two very expensive long-distance phone calls
True, when school had ended and she'd returned to Wisconsin, and he to Locust, Pennsylvania She had sworn to maintain a certain fidelity She would date occasionally, but merely as amusement
She would remain faithful

What a jump from 'White Light/White Heat'. Some of the WL/WH lyrics:

Hmm hmm, White light Aww I surely do love to watch that stuff tip itself in Hmm hmm, White light Watch that side, watch that side don't you know it gonna be dead in the drive Hmm hmm, White heat Hey foxy mama watchin' her walk down the street Hmm hmm, White light Come up side your head gonna make a deadend on your street

#TheVelvetUnderground #music #MusicTips #AndrewHickey #LaMonteYoung #JohnCage #podcast

Xiu Xiu are releasing Eraserhead Xiu Xiu on 2026-07-10. The first single is 'In Heaven'.

Xiu Xiu have since long toured their playing their version of the soundtrack to David Lynch's film Eraserhead. It's beautiful.

This is a calm song. I like the breaking of bottles at the end, it feels soothing to the sounds of an organ and what may be some kind of friction.

This is a cut of Xiu Xiu playing 'In Heaven' live in Scotland earlier this year.

#music #MusicTips #XiuXiu #DavidLynch

Amid the colorful cast of characters and personas who have distinguished themselves in rap—from Rammellzee to Kool Keith, Ol’ Dirty Bastard to Busta Rhymes—DOOM shines as another true original. When asked about the best advice he had ever received, he replied, “A wise man once said, ‘Do you.’ I know what he meant, but I didn’t really grasp what he said until maybe a year later. And that was like the wisest statement I heard out of any book or anything I ever read: ‘Do You.’ Be yourself and that’s the best thing you could be. Anytime you try to copy someone you’re not being genuine to yourself.”11 In the same interview he added, “I’m constantly striving for perfection, so what I’m doin’ is constantly elevatin’ and educatin’ myself in a way that, all right, I’m better than I was the previous day. Yunno, so, that could go on forever, there’s really not ever going to be a top, you know? I don’t think I’ll do it in this lifetime.”

The quote is from The Chronicles of DOOM by S. H. Fernando Jr.

Earlier this year, the BBC published a four-part podcast series on MF DOOM. DOOM is often referred to as 'your favourite rapper's favourite rapper', and there's something to that statement.

Two of my favourite DOOM albums are MM..FOOD and Madvillainy. Listen to either of those and you can't go wrong. There's something about the playfulmess (I accidentally wrote the 'm' but I'll let it be because it works) of that album that says a lot on how DOOM used comics, epic stories, souped-up samples, farce humour, and tricky words, not to mention sentence construction. DOOM is a legend in hip-hop and he was a legend while he was alive.

I mean:

DOOM had already arrived at a title for his full-length—Operation: Doomsday—from the best-selling Sidney Sheldon thriller The Doomsday Conspiracy (William Morrow, 1991). Loosely based on the Roswell incident of 1947, the story follows passengers on a bus in Switzerland who witness the crash of a UFO, that authorities claim as a weather balloon. The protagonist of the story, a member of US naval intelligence, stumbles on a plot called Operation Doomsday to keep the witnesses silent and cover up the fact that aliens have been in communication with governments on Earth for a long time. For DOOM, the title played perfectly into the concept for his new persona as he declared his mission to destroy rap.

To destroy rap.

Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.

That's Charles Bukowski.

I mean:

Inspired by their futuristic beats, DOOM could focus on his writing, stepping up his pen game. “Viktor the director, flip a script like Rob Reiner,” he says on the title track, capping it with the punchline, “The way a lot of dudes rhyme, their name should be knob shiner.”

Yeah:

In the canon of DOOM, Madvillainy, far and away, ranks as his magnum opus—an album that transformed a hungry underground upstart, struggling for a second chance, into a serious contender. As seldom as critical and popular tastes overlap, the stars were definitely aligned for this one, as the overwhelmingly glowing response greeting its March 2004 release suggested. Pitchfork called it “inexhaustibly brilliant,” adding, “Good luck finding a better hip-hop album this year, mainstream, indie, or otherwise.” The Village Voice hailed “an outlandishly imaginative collaboration.” Already divining the future, the site Hip-Hop DX said, “Classic albums generally need some time to marinate and gain that status, but fuck it; they didn’t follow any guidelines so why should I? Classic. Yes, I said it. Classic.” They were even dazzled across the pond. “The wily creativity on display here is astonishing,” marveled Mojo, while Q magazine simply called it “one utterly badass album.”

Bandcamp offer a guide to the MF DOOM discography.

DOOM lives in all of us; we all live in DOOM.

#music #MFDOOM #RecordClub

Mike D was a member of Beastie Boys, one of my favourite hip-hop bands. He's now released new music since the B-Boys stopped in 2012.

Here's a live video now that Mike is performing live. This video features his playing Beastie Boys' song 'Looking Down The Barrel of a Gun' which is a great fucking song, originally produced by The Dust Brothers.

...and he brought Money Mark onstage. Mark is an old B-Boys collaborator and a brilliant musician in his own right; his album Push The Button and his underappreciated Brand New by Tomorrow.

Check out Mark. God damn! He could and can fly.

OK, just one more video.

This is perhaps the best-ever live-concert video. Holy shit. Beastie Boys gave 50 people super-8 cameras and just asked them to never turn them off. A year after the gig, Yauch and a few others edited this together. DAMN.

#BeastieBoys #MikeD #music #MusicTips #MoneyMark #love #HipHop

Always do what will cost you the most.

Simone Weil said that.

Weil walked the walk.

I recently finished Patti Smith's Bread of Angels, a memoir.

Weil was convinced that the criteria for entering a war were vastly different, and more intense than for individuals who could make their own decisions. As a Frenchwoman, Weil therefore fully rejected the idea of involvement let alone the deployment of the army in Spain. As the moral being that she was, however, there was no alternative for her but to fight. Just as there are people who refuse military service for reasons of conscience or belief, and who are instead willing to accept any sanction and any sacrifice, for Simone Weil in the summer of 1936, it was indispensable for moral reasons to fight for the Republic and thus accept any sacrifice that needed to be made.

The quote is from Wolfram Eilenberger's The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times, a great book (although I loathe many of Rand's theories, there are good points in having her appear in the book).

I listen to Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood, and The Rajasthan Express' album Ranjha, a new and fairly loud album. It's hypnotic, mystic in a way that makes me recall the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Half conscious, I felt something weighty placed on my chest. I was too weak to open my eyes but felt the object with my hand. It was a box set containing a recording of Madama Butterfly, with the libretto in English and Italian. I could not even respond. She said I could listen to it anytime I wanted, but not until I was well. Then she reached for it, but I didn’t want to let it go and she let me hold it awhile longer. In the days and nights that followed, the wish to escape my body was only surpassed by a yearning to listen to the music of Puccini. There was no amount of penicillin or prayer more effective than my mother’s loving proviso. She placed the box atop the dresser so I could see it. I would drift in and out, yet another pounding migraine, but could also feel myself getting stronger, healing cells multiplying. I drank water, ate my Jell-O and slept. The sight of the box with a delicate sketch of Butterfly in her headdress and kimono spurred me on. When I recovered, I was finally able to hear the aria Un bel di Vedremo, once again transported by a voice that seemed a celestial messenger. There were three discs inside, each one with a winged cherub on the Angel label. I labored over the difficult libretto, but in truth I didn’t need to know the words of the aria. My mother had emptied the tip jar, no doubt sacrificing much. I remember all of this. My fiery desire to hear the music of Puccini coupled with my mother’s deep understanding of how she could reach me through the barriers of a relentlessly burning fever. The wedding of art and sacrifice. That is how I returned to the world.

Back to Patti Smith.

Smith recalls a scene from when she was a young child. Puccini's Madam Butterfly features this aria in the second act.

I'm reminded of Maria Callas's rendition of Bellini's Norma, a tragedy where Callas excels.

The great Maria Callas performs an aria from her signature role, Bellini's druid priestess Norma, with the Orchestre de l'Opera National de Paris and Georges Sebastian. Recorded live at the Palais Garnier on the 19th of December 1958, this concert marked the soprano's debut at the Paris Opera [...]

The consciously tepid strings and fluctuations of the same in contrast with Callas's voice is sublime, reaches a beyond that I can't describe. I'm struck by the simplicity and extraordinary brilliance of the aria. It sends me to a lull yet awakens myself with the bass strings, Callas's singular voice, the orchestral rise and fall à la a tide.

I've loved Rimbaud since I was a teenager. I stumbled across him at a local library. He opened my mind and showed me that I was not alone in some senses.

Again, from Smith's book:

On Saturday mornings I modeled at the Philadelphia Academy in exchange for drawing lessons. There was a 99-cent bookstall across from the bus station. I inspected it as usual and was drawn to the face of the young poet on the cover of Illuminations. Within a moment’s reading I was as beguiled by his words as his insolent beauty. Not having a dollar, nor willing to part with it, I slid Illuminations in my pocket, a crime I did not regret. Although his work was somewhat impenetrable it offered a new poetic language. I searched the library for something of him and found the words that called to me, would call forth from me, fixed and ephemeral, A Season in Hell, my furious guidebook.

A Season in Hell is as much ignoble confession as poetry, Rimbaud concedes his seemingly supernatural power over language while displaying a vehement self-loathing. You’ll always be a hyena, he writes, tearing himself in two, wrestling with the civil war of his personality. I recognized a relatable duality, the demonic hand in hand with the charitable. I was struck that he was barely nineteen, his suffering sealed within the pages of a book. I wanted to believe that his confession released him from his turmoil, and I sought to follow him down his shattering spiritual path.

It is beauty and Hell and the inner self in its sides, like an apeirogon.

#music #MusicTips #PattiSmith #ArthurRimbaud #SimoneWeil #MariaCallas #opera #Puccini

Jonathan Meiburg created Shearwater more than 25 years ago, together with Will Sheff. They were both in Okkervil River at the time.

Jonathan is a prolific writer. Not only does he write Shearwater songs, but he also writes books; his second book, The Secret Land: The Once and Future Life of Antarctica, is being written. Jonathan's just back to the USA after three months in Antarctica and southern Chile.

This is the first single from the coming Shearwater album. The album is named The New World. Jonathan's piano and voice works wonderfully at the start. He's really honed and mastered both his voice and expression over many years and mainly by caring for what he does, caring for what he wants to deliver.

It takes some skill to write a song like this. It's nearly a waltz, a carefully produced and mixed track that goes deeper by every minute. The piano repetition, the drum snare, the bass guitar, the guitar-warbles; Shearwater is a fun, funny, and tight machine.

There's a fun fact about the song: the title is a nod to The Monkees' 'Daydream Believer'. The song was written by John Stewart who was the uncle of Jamie Stewart. Jamie is in one of my fave bands, Xiu Xiu. Jamie plays the gong on 'Daydream Unbeliever'.

Full circle.

This is a very strong song. The album is released on 2026-07-31.

#music #MusicTips #Shearwater #XiuXiu

I've since long liked The Lemon Twigs. The band consists of two brothers who play most of the instruments on their albums. This album's different, as they've now included their live musicians on drum and bass on record.

The first two tracks set a clear tone: these are two young persons who've caved into the 1960s and 1970s sounds and have made something of their own. These songs are not pastische. Instead, it's easy to hear their dedication to songwriting and mainly writing hooks; it's hard to not sing backing vocals by myself (mainly in my head) when listening to a song like 'Nothin' But You'.

Speaking of that track, check out their vocal harmonies, the beautiful lead guitar, the jumpy bass, the clear thud of the bass drum, the great sound of a mid-and-treble-ranged acoustic guitar.

I dig the doubled guitars that come in at 02:19 and crescendo at 02:22...yikes.

The Lemon Twigs' songs are new miracles in old garb.

#music #MusicTips #TheLemonTwigs

When I started reading Patrick Radden Keefe's new book, London Falling, it says 'This is a true story.'

I think there's a story to be heard here; a true story, not the true story. The subtitle of the book is 'a mysterious death in a gilded city and a family's search for truth'.

Manic Street Preachers released This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. The title says a lot.

What is truth?

Merriam-Webster define truth partly as

the body of real things, events, and facts. also the real facts about something

As any old quantum physicist and philosopher could tell you, truth is subjective unless it is defined; when truth is defined, it can still be interpreted differently by different people. Hard to come to terms with at times.

Underworld have started releasing what I think are new versions of old songs. First this, 'Kittens', today there's 'Pearl's Girl' which isn't available to share. Underworld are one of my favourite electronic-music bands. When I saw them live in the mid-1990s, I had to choose between taking the last bus home or spend the night under the stars. I danced to their gig, left happy, found a t-shirt-selling Englishman who'd overdosed on cannabis, then spent the night in his and his mate's t-shirt-filled tent.

I've also spent the morning listening to Sepultura's wonderful album Chaos A.D.. I discovered the greatness of Sepultura in 2025 and I'm making up for lost time. Their debut album, Beneath the Remains, is a thrash-metal masterpiece.

Let's not forget Nathan Micay. His soundtrack for TV-series The Industry, season 4, sometimes bests what Daniel Lopatin (a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never) did with his soundtrack for Marty Supreme and what Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did in their soundtrack for, mainly, The Social Network and also the one for Challengers.

#music #soundtrack #philosophy #Underworld #NathanMicay #DanielLopatin #TrentReznor #AtticusRoss #MusicTips

This is the best neoclassical-cum-electronic album I've heard since... Jon Hopkins' last album? Or the album that Floating Points did with Pharaoh Sanders?

From the Bandcamp page:

Hand of Thought is the first full-length release by Indian composer Sanaya Ardeshir under her own name – introducing a parallel practice that exists alongside her work as electronic producer Sandunes. The album examines matrilineality – the tracing of kinship through the female bloodline – and its manifestation as intuition and wisdom through the trans-generational currency of music and her primary instrument – the piano. The album title is inspired by Kosho Uchiyama's Opening the Hand Of Thought – a seminal work in the development of Buddhism throughout East Asia.

#music #MusicTips

I love The Go! Team since way back.

Musically, the band combines indie rock and garage rock with a mixture of funk and Bollywood soundtracks, double dutch chants, old school hip-hop music and distorted guitars. Their songs are a mix of live instrumentation and samples from various sources.

I fucking love The Go! Team. I love Ian Parton, the person behind the band, although it's a collective effort, it's clear that he holds the reins.

'Buy Nothing Day' rocks. 02:35 in, there's lightning; how can a band like this sound like a marching school orchestra and carry a groove that otherwise only people like Sly Stone and Funkadelic could push out?

I just let this wave roll over myself. There's something that The Go! Team do that no other artist does. No other fucking artist. The joyous atmosphere by this Brighton, UK band kind of epitomises what came from the USA in the 1970s and then enhanced it. I can't put my finger on it and I leave it be so.

The vocals are by Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast, who've at times been truly great. Just as with The Go! Team proved by making albums that at times topped their debut, Best Coast did the same thing.

Bonus songs:

#music #MusicTips