From Africa With Fury: Rise by Seun Kuti

[howard male]

My Arts Desk review of Seun Kuti and Egypt 80's From Africa With Fury: Rise is here:

http://tinyurl.com/3mcdqe2

This really is one hell of a record.

[Jonathan E.]

It might well be one hell of a record and I really hope it is 'cos I already ordered an import of it for myself — but it seems to be one hell of a bad link. This time I get a 403 — I'm not "authorized" to view the resource! Same thing even if I go to the Arts Desk site, search and click the resulting link. Without repeating my characterization of The Arts Desk coding as lame — and going through all that palaver again, I'll simply say there are problems there that shouldn't be there. Something ain't right with their content management system.

[howard male]

This time it was actually a straight forward human error cock up. My review went up but someone else though they were doing Disc of the Day today. But mine should be up again tomorrow.

As for other Arts Desk problems, I for one have never once had a problem with accessing anything on the site, or with the speed it comes up on screen (at least not since its early teething problems over a year ago) and as far as I know they've not had any other complaints, so I really don't know why you keep getting problems, J.

[Jonathan E.]

Just my good luck, I guess — as in this situation. I have an unnatural talent for finding typos and other assorted publishing glitches, both digital and paper. A few screwed up links? That's nothing — or it wasn't twenty years ago. Today, I think standards are a bit higher. Human error is probably about the same.

[howard male]

It's now up again on the original link given above.

[Jonathan E.]

Hooray!

And the link is — for those who can't be bothered to scroll back up to the top —

http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=3412:cd-sean-kuti-from-africa-with-fury-rise&Itemid=107

and, Holy Frickin' Moses! it works!

[Jonathan E.]

A typo in the first line:

Alarm bells went off when a learnt that . . .

That's impressive . . . or is it really a weird dialect Howard has adopted?

It's an unnatural talent I have, I tell you.

[Jonathan E.]

And, of course, Eno produced an African album long before he worked with the Talking Heads, so he's really not much of a novice at the game.

Maybe we should have a quiz about what that album is.

[Jonathan E.]

I'm trying to think of one of these legendary "half hour" Fela tracks, besides a live recording, that "the great man himself sometimes meandered on for".

Any titles, any one?

[Jonathan E.]

I think Eno once said something along the lines of Fela would be the one artist he'd listen to forever more if he could only choose one. No attribution unfortunately.

[Rob Hall]

I think Eno once said something along the lines of Fela would be the one artist he'd listen to forever more if he could only choose one. No attribution unfortunately.

Eno's bio, "Some Faraway Beach", has a quote taken from an NME interview that Eno gave in 1980: 'Maybe I can make the English people forsake their new wave records and rush out to buy Fela Ransome-Kuti? ... It's a beautiful music - it's so thrilling to me, I could work twenty-four hours a day on this music. It's rhythmically sophisticated in an interesting way; it's perfect for dancing because it leaves holes in all the right places ... You listen to this and you can't help but think, "What do we have? The fuckin' Jam!"'

Maybe this is what you were thinking of Jonathan?

[Jonathan E.]

Close enough for . . . Afrobeat. Thanks, Rob.

[kas]

You know, sometimes I almost begin to think that Eno bloke should adopt a pseudonym for his non-atmospheric production jobs...

From what I've heard of "Rise" it indeed sounds fierce. I agree with you, Howard: the band has an almost frightening tightness and precision, their playing was seamless also on stage that night I witnessed them.

[howard male]

Jonathan wrote –

A typo in the first line:

Alarm bells went off when a learnt that . . .

That's impressive . . . or is it really a weird dialect Howard has adopted?

Does it really give you so much pleasure to publicly humiliate me by pointing out typos that my dyslexic brain has failed to notice, Jonathan? Ever since I was a child I’ve written ‘a’ when I meant ‘I’ and ‘b’ when I meant ‘d’. I catch most of these stupid errors these days, but some still inevitably slip through the net.

If you’d like to put your considerable ‘unnatural talent’ to use without embarrassing me in the process, you could always just PM me with these mistakes. I’d be most grateful, really I would.

[Jonathan E.]

Sorry, Howard — some of us are writers and some of us are editors. Honestly, I assumed The Arts Desk has some sort of editorial process; you've certainly mentioned your text being monkeyed with at least a little and not coming out as expected. And, frankly it should have an editorial eye — most writers can't clean everything out of their writing, even with unnatural talent. But, you know, professional standards are professional standards and, if one is in the business of criticizing, it's not unreasonable that one's own work should be held up to scrutiny. Spell checkers are a big problem because one assumes everything is correct and the eye gets lazy; attention to the detail of one's writing is, I'm sure you'll agree, a useful attribute to develop. If you know you have these problems with transposing words, work on them so they no longer occur! Or insist that an editor makes a pass over your text.