Stats for nerds
3recommend
11mentions
9people
2011–2022years
27% recommend73% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- It was quite amazing to see some of the stuff they pulled. For instance, bringing country music legend Tammy Wynette into the studio with a rapper to do a club dance song ("Justified & Ancient") seems absolutely bonkers but it worked. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7_ajdd99CM )
I highly recommend reading Bill Drummond's 1988 book "The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way)." It seemed like brilliant satire (The KLF was releasing experimental trance music at the time) but he and Jimmy ended up at top of the charts on multiple occasions in the years that followed.
- A more down-to-earth guide, and an absolutely fantastic read at that, is The KLF's "The Manual - How To Have A Number One The Easy Way" by the KLF:
http://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/
It's a bit dated, given that they wrote it in the 80s, but it contains some absolute gems:
Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, however, are kings of writing chorus lyrics that go straight to the emotional heart of the 7" single buying girls in this country. Their most successful records will kick into the chorus with a line which encapsulates the entire emotional meaning of the song. This will obviously be used as the title. As soon as Rick Astley hit the first line of the chorus on his debut single it was all over - the Number One position was guaranteed:
"I'm never going to give you up"
It says it all. It's what every girl in the land whatever her age wants to hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with:
"I'm never gonna let you down I'm never going to fool around or upset you"
GENIUS.
As soon as they had those lyrics written they must have known they could have taken out a block booking on the Number One slot. Then within the next twelve months to have written the chorus:
"I should be so lucky Luck, lucky, lucky I should be so lucky in love"
- The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way)
- As a middle-aged fogey, I hadn’t heard of Rock Stardom for Dumbshits so thanks for the comment. I’d be interested to see how it compares to the The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way)¹ by Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond (the KLF aka the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu aka the Timelords). I only vaguely remember reading it in the early nineties so could probably do with a re-read.
- I'm thinking about end of this piece, where it briefly discusses some artists who are finding some measure of fame and fortune in their seventies and eighties.
And I'm thinking about a story I saw here a little earlier this morning about a guy who built his gleefully stupid idea of "a dating site for fans of Kanye West" into something that got him a meeting with that star. [1]
And I'm thinking about The KLF's "The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way" [2] and how much that Kanye-dating story reminded me of the parts of that which weren't specifically about the nuts and bolts of making a pop song for eighties Britain.
And I don't necessarily have any conclusions. Something about the role of advertising in our culture to grab attention, to tell people that hey, this thing you might like exists, and to repeatedly tell them that until they actually bother having a look at the thing [3] and maybe deciding they like it enough to tell other people about it and maybe even give you a little money for the thing, and how hard it is to keep doing that when you're focused on honing your craft and doing the best whatever-it-is you can do around the demands of keeping a roof over your head, and who the hell can find time to do all that advertising, let alone learn how to do it effectively.
And you know who has the money to pay people to do all that advertising? Mostly people working for the megacorporations that squat over our cultural landscape, making work that walks a fine line between being new enough to be different, but close enough to existing successful work to be able to get funding.
And once again I want to start that Kickstarter to dig up the corpse of Jesse Helms and do terrible things to him in vengeance for his role in gutting the NEA that I keep making jokes about lately.
1: https://thekanyestory.com/, hn discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19523853 (such as it is)
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual - the full text is one search for "klf manual" away
3: tangentially, I make nerdy comics about robot ladies with reality problems (http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/) and cartoon animals in space (http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/) and am working on reprinting my super-stylized and nerdy tarot deck (http://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/)
- I'm reminded of the KLF's cynical but observant "THE MANUAL: HOW TO HAVE A NUMBER ONE THE EASY WAY": http://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/
"Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole. Anybody with a proper job or tied up with full time education will not have the time to devote to see it through. Also, being on the dole gives you a clearer perspective on how much of society is run."
