Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Green reviews the singles!

 



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11 comments:

  1. Phil KnightSeptember 16, 2026 at 11:12 AM

    Gregory Isaacs - Night Nurse. "Not one of his best."

    What a twat.

    Now understand why I've always disliked him.

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  2. Phil KnightSeptember 17, 2026 at 10:20 AM

    I was being a bit too harsh there, but come on, Night Nurse is unimpeachably great.

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    1. EdSeptember 18, 2026 at 5:02 PM

      I suspect a bit of anxiety of influence / inferiority complex there. I mean: if I had been trying to make a career out of melodic pop reggae, and then Gregory Isaacs came out with Night Nurse, I would have been feeling a bit miffed, too.

      “Not one of his best” seems to have been a bit of a habit with Green, too. He uses it about 20th Century Boy, FFS!

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    2. SIMON REYNOLDSSeptember 19, 2026 at 4:38 PM

      Well, it's hardly "anxiety of influence" - the first line says Gregory Isaac is a first-rank hero and influence to me!

      He rates his other stuff higher - are *you* familiar with his work prior to "Night Nurse"? I couldn''t confidently assert any opinion either way.

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    3. AnonymousSeptember 19, 2026 at 6:47 PM

      Isn’t that exactly what anxiety of influence is all about? Admiration mixed up with rivalry. I think Harold Bloom used it first. His classic example was Keats reading Shakespeare and Milton, and being so much in awe of their genius that he had to really struggle to produce anything of his own that he would think was worthwhile.

      I am afraid I can’t say whether Night Nurse did actually represent Isaacs falling away. I know people rate Cool Ruler, from 1978, but I haven’t really listened to it. But anyway I agree with Phil: Night Nurse is amazing.

      I don’t want to sound like I am knocking Green at all. He is a colossal talent who has been responsible for a lot of great music. But I do think the artistic personality can be quite funny at times.


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    4. EdSeptember 20, 2026 at 6:51 AM

      That was me again ^

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    5. Phil KnightSeptember 20, 2026 at 1:37 PM

      Isaacs' earlier work is certainly grittier, more "authentic" than Night Nurse, but I thought Green's whole schtick was about eschewing the gritty and authentic?

      I think that NIght Nurse is a great song in the same way that Jealous Guy or Wichita Lineman are great songs. They're all "you know it when you hear it" songs. Just seems to me to be a bit churlish not to acknowledge that.

      Although in the spirit of "let he who casts the first stone", I am of course capable of much churlishness myself.

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    6. Phil KnightSeptember 21, 2026 at 2:40 AM

      Thinking about it, Green like a lot of intellectuals and highly intelligent people is a bit of a mana-addict. He just loves that magical, intangible, interpersonal spirit-stuff, precisely because it defies theoretical analysis. Which is why he reveres so many soul and R'n'B figures.

      I suppose his whole oeuvre is an attempt to recycle/recreate that mana in his own slick, dainty, hyper-referential way.

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    7. Simon ReynoldsSeptember 21, 2026 at 2:45 PM

      The Anxiety of Influence theory is a bit more complicated.... influenced himself by Freud, Harold Bloom is thinking of processes that work in a more unconscious or semi-conscious way. So someone who does have anxiety of influence towards a specific ancestor, would be more likely to disavow the predecessor or in some way disguise the debt and the inheritance.

      (Freud's agon with Shakespeare is the classic example).

      So the influences you openly cite - these might not actually be the true deep abiding ones.

      Gregory Isaacs and lover's rock would be a relatively recent and consciously acquired influence for Green I should think... more truly formative would be Paul McCartney and Robert Wyatt.

      But that said, he was quite open even then about the profound effect the Beatles had on him as a kid and he got Robert Wyatt to play on 'The Sweetest Girl' - so perhaps he doesn't have any anxiety about them either!

      It's a ridiculously complex theory, I can read several pages of Bloom without understanding any of it, so much of it is bound up with tropes from classical rhetoric etc.

      One puzzling aspect of it is that at one point he says the anxiety isn't about formal characteristics at all - it's more about the deep thoughts that the precursor poets has had. More like the emotions than their formal expression.

      (So with Freud versus Shakespeare agon, the troubling thought for Freud would be that Shakespeare had a better understanding of the dark impulses of the human mind and came up with these perceptions centuries before him).

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    8. Simon ReynoldsSeptember 21, 2026 at 2:50 PM

      >I suppose his whole oeuvre is an attempt >to recycle/recreate that mana in his own >slick, dainty, hyper-referential way.

      Yeah, that is exactly what is going on in "Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)" - it's laid out in a totally open and conscious way.

      I think there's a kind of total split - the lyrics and the interview statements come from one part of the brain, and the melodies etc come from somewhere else that is really like the same place that Paul McCartney got his melodies (waking up with 'Yesterday' in his head fully formed). Unreason, negative capability, "soul' - there's lots of names for it.

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  3. Edmund UndeadSeptember 17, 2026 at 11:12 PM

    Paul Julian Strohmeyer (I had to look it up) disses Simon Le Bon's 'ridiculous' birth name lol.

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