For many musicians, music is just a career. For others it’s an expression and reflection on their life. A way of bloodletting.

Amazon wants me to buy Giant Drag and Metric albums.

Number 5 of 2004 — Annie: Anniemal

When I was first formulating my top 10 albums of 2004, this one was nowhere near it. But over the subsequent months, I came to realise that there’s much more going on here than first appears. Pitchfork recently remarked that live, Annie is adrift when it comes to who she is expected to be: pop princess, indie-friendly songwriter, or dancefloor filler. All these personas are on this album.

You see, Annie writes pop songs. Not pop songs like Kylie. But real pop songs with tunes, lyrics (and vocals) that are staggeringly uplifting in a helium kind of way. We’re talking several miles high. But there’s also a downside. Some songs have a depressing edge to them. This obtuse and unexpected balance is what makes this album so brilliant. It’s not a pop album however. There aren’t twelve hit singles here. Anniemal is not the album I thought it would be. It’s much much more. And it’s a strange, um, animal.

Let’s start with the first five tracks. There’s the quirky half-spoken animal oriented Intro, Chewing Gum, her debut UK single, which convinces the listener that Annie is a dumb pop puppet although it’s probably the wittiest track of the last couple of decades. All Too Late shows she isn’t dumb: “I don’t wanna wanna / be no primadonna / tired standing waiting feeling like you never wanna”. It’s a dark string laden affair with scary synth drops, tribal drums, random musical add-ins and subtle hidden snare rolls. Me Plus One is the perfect example of what Annie is about. Every single vocal placement is perfect – from the delivery of the lyrics to the “ooh, wooh-ooh”’s, the “baa-baa-baa”’s (and there’s plenty of these all over the album), and the phat squelchy bass line. My Heartbeat is all happy, but feels strangely sad to me.

Now, first time around this was where it lost me. Nothing following comes close to these first tracks, or so I thought. You need to go back and forwards. Listen to the album again. For example, compare and contrast the outer spaceyness of Me Plus One with the am-I-happy-or-not feel of the later Happy without You “The day I left you / must be the greatest in my life”. Then you realise that there are emotions at work here. The songs work together as an album. Helpless Fool for Love scales the highs and lows of fooling (falling) in love, both musically and lyrically. The chorus is incredible.

No Easy Love is a chunky funky dancefloor number, “Please just stay around / you are my beat, my sound / my light, my destiny”, and Greatest Hit takes wholesale rips from Madonna’s Everybody and turns it into a dancefloor lovesong, “We dance and groove in the disco lights / I want you alone with me tonight / Can I hold you, make you feel all right? / Really want to stay here all the night.”

My change of mind became most apparent on Come Together. A track that starts all quiet, mellow, reflective. “When you’re feeling sad and blue / you should know that you are / the sun and the moon to me” Then after a minute or so veers off into Disco and runs around like a dog with several tails for the next six minutes. The album finishes with My Best Friend, Annie’s homage to her partner who produced her early work, including Greatest Hit, but died in 2001 from a congential heart defect, aged 23.

But, if you don’t believe me that this album is great, Pitchfork loves it, so I’m surely not wrong.

MIT’s Media Lab has officially launched their not-for-profit scheme to provide cheap laptop computers to children of developing countries. Once 5-10 million have been ordered and paid for, manufacturing will begin. You do the maths.

Someone appeared on Newsnight last night to extol the virtues of this. Apparently, children will be able to learn to use this without teachers and have access to ‘millions of books’.

Except they won’t. Sure they have WiFi, but out of the box, only peer-to-peer networking. So if your friend has a book, you can have it too. How do they get that book? They need access to the internet. MIT “are also exploring ways to connect them to the backbone of the Internet at very low cost.” Plus, if you cannot read or write, how do you send messages to your friends? Or read a book you’ve downloaded?

What about upgrades, repairs, roll out of new software?

Besides, do children in the developing world really need computers, and if their respective governments had the money and inclination to spend $100 on them, a computer wouldn’t be high up the list.

A piece on today’s Sky News Sunrise highlighted that there are around 2,400 vacancies for head teachers, which I presume means in England and Wales, since Scotland is always treated differently. Whilst being a head teacher is seen as the peak of a teaching career, its relatively low wage compared to senior teachers (certainly in the public sector) and to equivalent positions in industry and business is seen as a major hurdle. In addition, it is considered to be a stressful job with long hours.

I’ll admit I know nothing about the specifics of being a head teacher, although this advisory PDF document National Standards for Headteachers outlines clearly the responsibilities, skills and actions necessary. Aside from the domain-specific needs, this reads like a typical job spec for someone in middle or upper management in business.

However, there appears to be a philosophy inherent in education that only teachers become deputy and head teachers. Furthermore, there’s no broad advertising in employment pages of newspapers for such positions. One has to go to something like the Times Educational Supplement for jobs. I looked here today, and found 198 head teacher positions. Hmm.. not exactly 2,400.

So how do you attract more applications? Here are some ideas:

• Promote head teacher positions to industry and business
• Advertise more broadly for such positions, don’t hide them away in specialist publications
• Explain (or reference) the responsibilities, requirements and benefits – not everyone understands what a salary of ‘Group 6, Salary Range L29 – L35 means’
• Recruit staff from industry and business and provide appropriate re-training
• Don’t shut everyone else out. The NAHT (National Association of Head Teachers) job site requires registration before you can find jobs! This is stupid.
• Provide teachers with appropriate management and organisational skills so that they feel confident and able to progress to higher positions.
• Don’t expect or require head teachers to teach.

According to The Guardian, electronics manufacturers and retailers have warned the Government that plans to turn off the analogue TV signal in the UK are in danger of running “backwards not forwards”.

Apparently, millions of analogue TVs and VCRs are still being bought per annum.

Here’s a solution:

• Electronics manufacturers and retailers stop selling analogue gear.
• The government stops the phasing out of analogue (from 2008) and goes for a all-at-once switchover in 2012.
• When TV licenses are issued, they include a warning on the license that analogue equipment will not work beyond 2011, and advise people to buy digital TVs, digital set-top boxes, or subscribe to digital satellite and cable channels.

“I’ve always noticed there’s nothing bigger than all the little things.”
Ayria – Infiltrating My Way Through The System