THE DUKE LISTENS TO
NO WICKED HEART SHALL PROSPER
BY SELFISH CUNT
NO WICKED HEART SHALL PROSPER
BY SELFISH CUNT
The fold-out lyric sheet packaged neatly within the slim cardboard
cover of No Wicked Heart Shall Prosper, the debut album by
loveable London malcontents Selfish Cunt, features, by way of
introduction, a quote from Tropic Of Cancer by Henry Miller;
“To sing you must first open your mouth.
You must have a pair of lungs and a little knowledge of music.
It is not necessary to have an accordion or a guitar.
The essential thing is to want to sing.
This then is a song.
I am singing.”
It’s hard to imagine a more fitting opening. Or, indeed, a more
fitting application of said sentiments.
Selfish Cunt, it’s fair to say, are highly unlikely to ever bother
the likes of U2 or Coldplay in terms of musical ability or
prospective chart placements. Even if that band name wasn’t so
gleefully offensive, the musical palette - distorted, detuned
guitar, spitting drum machine and rasping, sneering Lydon-esque
vocals - is utilised in the creation of something a fair old
distance from the township of Melody.
What Selfish Cunt have mastered, though, is the art of
articulating fury, disgust and frustration, of creating something
so passionately confrontational, so teeth-grindingly intense that
a fella simply can’t ignore it.
No Wicked Heart… is a scowling motherfucker of a record, a record
fit to make someone like The Duke beg for forgiveness even if I
haven’t really done anything particularly wrong. “You sold out,
without an ounce of shame!”, screams the opening Corporate Slut,
and for about 20 seconds or maybe 27 I was ready to run the hell
over here and tear down every one of those Amazon links.
I’m sorry, Selfish Cunt. Shit, man, a fella has to support the
wife / kids / miscellaneous somehow.
Ignorance and intolerance are the twin targets herein. Although
much of the bile is directed towards the particularly British
strands of such, the message is universal. Full Swing, for
example, a horrifying, minimalist account of an apparent rape,
could just as easily relate to Chicago as to Hackney.
“I tried to look away,
But I couldn’t look away,
You see it was already in full swing.”
Musically, Selfish Cunt bring to mind the likes of the Sex
Pistols, certainly, but more accurately they evoke the art-punk
shenanigans of Lydon’s post-Pistols outfit, PiL, and the socially
conscious, electronica-infused work of Gang Of Four. Most of all,
though, the spirit of The Fall looms eerily over proceedings.
Thankfully Martin Tomlinson is a hell of a lot easier on the eyes
than that craggy faced bastard Mark E Smith. In the inlay photo,
he even looks the very spit of a young Elvis Presley, ie, pre-
Hollywood, army, burgers, orchestral motherfucking arrangements.
Tomlinson is also, I dare say, the most strikingly antagonistic
frontman to have emerged from the shadows in ages. Openly,
aggressively homosexual, stick-thin with the looks of a model,
blessed with a sarcasm and a don’t-give-a-fuck attitude that even
in this period when musicians are more actively political than at
any time since the early 1980’s, still seems shocking. Outwardly
nihilistic, for sure, but beneath that sarcastic façade there is a
genuine concern, a yearning for change and reform.
No Wicked Heart Shall Prosper could have ended up being a hollow,
art-school exercise in empty sloganeering, but so compelling, so
heartfelt are the 11 slabs of distortion, minimalist beats and
hollering contained herein, that something which could easily have
become self-parody becomes, instead, mesmerising, often
terrifying. The atmosphere of dread, of impending catastrophe, is
nigh-on suffocating, but you stick with it. You wanna see where
it's all gonna take you. Certainly nowhere particularly inventive
in so far as chord structures or arrangements are concerned.
Selfish Cunt are as blunt with their sound as they are with their
message.
Whilst similar proponents of aural terrorism opt for the “fuck it,
what’s the point?” route, Selfish Cunt, especially in the likes of
Fuck The Poor and The Coming Of The White Man, demand action. Feel
outraged, would you ever, not because the songs are laced with
filthy words and because the band invite usage of the word Cunt
every time they’re mentioned, but because of the diabolical shit
depicted in these 34 furious minutes.
“Bang bang”, hollers Tomlinson in Fuck The Poor, “Another nigger
dead.” It may well be a lyric designed to shock, but it’s also a
lyric that perfectly captures the shrugging, unconcerned arrogance
of such a worryingly large percentage of British society.
It’s nothing to do with me, what the hell should I be bothered
about it for? I didn’t fucking shoot them / rob them / take their
jobs / evict them.
The only problem with it all is that the folks who “get” what’s
going on here, are the folks that least need to hear it. Selfish
Cunt are never going to be gracing the top ten, barring some act
of divine intervention, and the only folks who are going to pick
up the album are the folks who either read about Tomlinson’s
antics in the pages of NME, or the folks who know that a song like
Britain Is Shit is, in all likelihood, going to be something they
have no trouble identifying with.
Even that cover of Bobby Brown’s My Prerogative is unlikely to tip
the scales very far one way or the other.
If you by any chance paid a visit to The Duke’s lovingly crafted
MP3 Digest in the last couple weeks then you may have heard the
version of Fuck The Poor that was on there a week or so back. That
template doesn’t come under threat of progression at any point on
the parent album. Stark, bitter, positively fucking raging, it
offers neither concession to the more traditionally-minded
listener, nor any answers of note to the litany of faults it so
precisely highlights.
Answers, any sense of hope whatsoever, might well arrive at some
point. For now, though, Selfish Cunt want to terrify their
audience into recognising these faults. Sometimes that’s a harder
task than correction.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line
cover of No Wicked Heart Shall Prosper, the debut album by
loveable London malcontents Selfish Cunt, features, by way of
introduction, a quote from Tropic Of Cancer by Henry Miller;
“To sing you must first open your mouth.
You must have a pair of lungs and a little knowledge of music.
It is not necessary to have an accordion or a guitar.
The essential thing is to want to sing.
This then is a song.
I am singing.”
It’s hard to imagine a more fitting opening. Or, indeed, a more
fitting application of said sentiments.
Selfish Cunt, it’s fair to say, are highly unlikely to ever bother
the likes of U2 or Coldplay in terms of musical ability or
prospective chart placements. Even if that band name wasn’t so
gleefully offensive, the musical palette - distorted, detuned
guitar, spitting drum machine and rasping, sneering Lydon-esque
vocals - is utilised in the creation of something a fair old
distance from the township of Melody.
What Selfish Cunt have mastered, though, is the art of
articulating fury, disgust and frustration, of creating something
so passionately confrontational, so teeth-grindingly intense that
a fella simply can’t ignore it.
No Wicked Heart… is a scowling motherfucker of a record, a record
fit to make someone like The Duke beg for forgiveness even if I
haven’t really done anything particularly wrong. “You sold out,
without an ounce of shame!”, screams the opening Corporate Slut,
and for about 20 seconds or maybe 27 I was ready to run the hell
over here and tear down every one of those Amazon links.
I’m sorry, Selfish Cunt. Shit, man, a fella has to support the
wife / kids / miscellaneous somehow.
Ignorance and intolerance are the twin targets herein. Although
much of the bile is directed towards the particularly British
strands of such, the message is universal. Full Swing, for
example, a horrifying, minimalist account of an apparent rape,
could just as easily relate to Chicago as to Hackney.
“I tried to look away,
But I couldn’t look away,
You see it was already in full swing.”
Musically, Selfish Cunt bring to mind the likes of the Sex
Pistols, certainly, but more accurately they evoke the art-punk
shenanigans of Lydon’s post-Pistols outfit, PiL, and the socially
conscious, electronica-infused work of Gang Of Four. Most of all,
though, the spirit of The Fall looms eerily over proceedings.
Thankfully Martin Tomlinson is a hell of a lot easier on the eyes
than that craggy faced bastard Mark E Smith. In the inlay photo,
he even looks the very spit of a young Elvis Presley, ie, pre-
Hollywood, army, burgers, orchestral motherfucking arrangements.
Tomlinson is also, I dare say, the most strikingly antagonistic
frontman to have emerged from the shadows in ages. Openly,
aggressively homosexual, stick-thin with the looks of a model,
blessed with a sarcasm and a don’t-give-a-fuck attitude that even
in this period when musicians are more actively political than at
any time since the early 1980’s, still seems shocking. Outwardly
nihilistic, for sure, but beneath that sarcastic façade there is a
genuine concern, a yearning for change and reform.
No Wicked Heart Shall Prosper could have ended up being a hollow,
art-school exercise in empty sloganeering, but so compelling, so
heartfelt are the 11 slabs of distortion, minimalist beats and
hollering contained herein, that something which could easily have
become self-parody becomes, instead, mesmerising, often
terrifying. The atmosphere of dread, of impending catastrophe, is
nigh-on suffocating, but you stick with it. You wanna see where
it's all gonna take you. Certainly nowhere particularly inventive
in so far as chord structures or arrangements are concerned.
Selfish Cunt are as blunt with their sound as they are with their
message.
Whilst similar proponents of aural terrorism opt for the “fuck it,
what’s the point?” route, Selfish Cunt, especially in the likes of
Fuck The Poor and The Coming Of The White Man, demand action. Feel
outraged, would you ever, not because the songs are laced with
filthy words and because the band invite usage of the word Cunt
every time they’re mentioned, but because of the diabolical shit
depicted in these 34 furious minutes.
“Bang bang”, hollers Tomlinson in Fuck The Poor, “Another nigger
dead.” It may well be a lyric designed to shock, but it’s also a
lyric that perfectly captures the shrugging, unconcerned arrogance
of such a worryingly large percentage of British society.
It’s nothing to do with me, what the hell should I be bothered
about it for? I didn’t fucking shoot them / rob them / take their
jobs / evict them.
The only problem with it all is that the folks who “get” what’s
going on here, are the folks that least need to hear it. Selfish
Cunt are never going to be gracing the top ten, barring some act
of divine intervention, and the only folks who are going to pick
up the album are the folks who either read about Tomlinson’s
antics in the pages of NME, or the folks who know that a song like
Britain Is Shit is, in all likelihood, going to be something they
have no trouble identifying with.
Even that cover of Bobby Brown’s My Prerogative is unlikely to tip
the scales very far one way or the other.
If you by any chance paid a visit to The Duke’s lovingly crafted
MP3 Digest in the last couple weeks then you may have heard the
version of Fuck The Poor that was on there a week or so back. That
template doesn’t come under threat of progression at any point on
the parent album. Stark, bitter, positively fucking raging, it
offers neither concession to the more traditionally-minded
listener, nor any answers of note to the litany of faults it so
precisely highlights.
Answers, any sense of hope whatsoever, might well arrive at some
point. For now, though, Selfish Cunt want to terrify their
audience into recognising these faults. Sometimes that’s a harder
task than correction.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line
