Lester Bangs hated New Years. Each one was a litany to disintegration and lost dreams. In Your Ears quite likes them. Here's why.

I Like New Years because of the chance to clear psychic clutter.

I like the idea of beginning something, not finishing it.

I appreciate the fact that people may forget last year's mistakes that I made.

It's good to have an excuse to see friends again... and to have a whole year before worrying about Christmas.

New Year means another year closer to President Bush leaving office.

I love "Best Ofs" from the previous year. They make much more sense of the world than watching the news as it happens.

I love Summer Festivals. If Singapore actually had a Summer.

Three different public holidays in one month. What's not to love?

"You're at a party. There's someone there who is just like you. Yet they are the last ones in the room you really want to talk to. Yet somehow you feel duty-bound. Now explain that!"

This was the task set me by my friend Simon, and which I thought I should take on. So this one's for you, Simon.

As foreigners, familiarity is fearful. Distance on the other hand relaxes us. We're natural escapists, that's why we're here in the first place. So for instance, we often feel most "relaxed" around the people who are "further" from us. Yet inherantly, they are also the people that we potentially have less in common with.

So? The risk of conversation is greater. And with those from where we're from, chances are better we'll just be able to "talk shit".

But...

Familiarity also brings with it fear of failure. People who are like us remind us inherantly of those we grew up with. Which explains the dilemma. We become the shy people we once were.

With foreigners, we are the confident people we now are.

Which suggested that deep down, we are pretty confused people.

Amen.

Confessions of a space addict.

"This first trilogy is really about the father, the struggles of a father, or a man, basically, to find himself, and at the same time fall into a trap of wanting certain powers, making a pact with the devil and basically spending the rest of his life regretting it." – George Lucas, April 2005.

The year was 1977, I was five. It was 28 years ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

Actually, the place was America. Fort Collins, Colorado. Not that unlike Tatooine. Times were different – Jimmy Carter was president, George Lucas still had a neck. It was the year that I saw Star Wars, a film that would completely screw up my life.

I thought I was already an experienced movie-goer by this time. That I was hip, ready for anything. This after all was my third-ever film, and Casey's Shadow and Pete's Dragon had surely prepared me for the highs and lows of the big screen. I was wrong. I wasn't prepared for this.

I'm certain that I'd have turned out to become something safe and steady like an accounts director or policy analyst, had I not stepped into that darkened movie theatre on that fateful day – and been utterly petrified by the sight of an enormous steel creature in black, choking a man to death by merely raising his hand.

The trouble was, the fear was addictive.

With his menacing metallic breathing and haunting baratone drawl, Darth Vader defined for me there and then what the archetypal scary bastard would look like. Who could forget that terrfying statement the Dark Lord later made, ushering in an age of gloom to the galaxy, and a death-knell to all things good and rebellious:

"This... is CNN."

No, but really. Back in 1977, nobody could have told me that I'd spend nearly three decades locked in the hold of this double-trilogy monster, like an X-Wing fighter pulled hopelessly into the Death Star's tractor beam.

My father's generation had the Vietnam War. Mine had Star Wars. Our torment has lasted so much longer.

So, come May 19 or thereabouts, as I step out of that darkened theatre for the sixth time – this time a little more certain than I was the first time that Vader wouldn't soon jump out at me from behind the toilet door – spare a thought for me and many like me.

Our Wars may be over, but our years of therapy are just beginning.

Four letters you should remember... MASH.

It's officially year of the mash-up... you heard it here. Take it from me, you're going to start hearing these things everywhere.

What are they? Take a look at the most prominent mash-up so far, Jay Z and Linkin Park's mash of Encore with Numb. Then dive into the Internet ether and look for DJ DangerMouse's Gray Album.

Fusing the Beatles White Album with Jay Z's Black Album was a stroke of genius. Not asking permission... well, how many artists out there asked first before doing great things?

Which opens a can of worms I plan to scratch on a lot this year... if you pardon my metaphor.

All I'll say now is, for those of you who still shun downloading or burning CDs, take note. The future of music is alive and well online. If the music industry isn't ready, then I know which body is more likely to win the war of attrition.

Fans are loyal to good music. Full stop. And they remember those who fleaced them in the past.

The irony of the whole download debate is the cash-cow digital CD format which replaced vinyl, costing us all packets of money in buying new equpiment and new CDs, is the exact format which has turned around and bitten the industry in the arse.

That's kharma.

Can I get an Encore? Do you want more?

"Freedom's just another word for broke."

- Luke Clark.

Tom Waits on why we are like crows (First appeared in Black Book, Sept 2002) Need you know more to click below?

Oh, crows. Well crows are like the teenagers of the bird world.

And they say the trouble with crows is that by nine o'clock they've done all their work and they've got too much time on their hands. And they will spend the rest of the day playing a primitive form of rugby. Or playing keep off the nest.

Or they'll sit and yap and chat. And they've discovered that there's no biological reason for this... but a crow will sit on an anthill until he's completely engulfed by the ants within and be in an almost hypnotic state during the the sitting.

They said the only answer they can come up with is that it's pleasure for them. That it's a form of drug abuse.

And their eyes roll back in their head and they tip their head up to the sky. They said it's part of a crow's destiny, because they've got the largest brain in proportion to their bodies of any bird and they have a lot of time on their hands.

It's inevitable there'd be a descent into drugs.

Laughs

What do DJs do it for, and would you trust one with your sister?

"In November 1987, Danny Rampling and his wife-to-be Jenni threw a party in the Fitness Centre gym near Southwark Bridge, just south of the Thames. "Sensation seekers, let the music take you to the top," declared the invitation... (Rampling recalls) "The first night was quite nerve-racking. Carl Cox played with me, and another guy that played funk, so it was a real mish-mash really."

"There was a funk crowd and a house crowd and it just didn't work. It was shaky but it was fun, hence the enthusiasm to do it again."" – From Altered State, by Matthew Collin, published by Serpent's Tail, 1997.

Matthew Collin's insightful Altered State entertainingly detailed the British experience of "DJs and disco biscuits" from its roots in the clubs of Chicago, the beaches of Ibiza and the degenerate warehouses of South London, all the way up to the commercial empire we see today.

It's nice to remember that the likes of Danny Rampling and Carl Cox were once just pimply kids spinning tunes in disused old buildings, rather than the cashed-up style leaders we see today.

DJ culture is an odd hybrid of musical culture. Indeed, while many may rightly claim that the British were just responsible for adding hype and a price-tag to what had its roots in Philly disco nights, San Fransisco gay clubs and Harlem street corners, the truth is that London in the late 1980s wrote the rule book for the modern-day cult of DJ-dom, for better or for worse.

Had he been alive to see it, cynical rock journalist Lester Bangs would have had a few angry things to say about the whole thing. How did music go from the visual feast of lights, costumes, guitars and leather that the rock concert gave us, to a packed crowd waving their hands in the air at one sullen looking bloke in a t-shirt, playing other people's records??

We have become strange. All manner of explanations are possible, from the earnest ("Now it's all about the music, man") to the desperate ("It's the chicks, dog") to the downright greedy ("This way I don't have to split the cash with the band, bro").

And as I sit here typing this, recovering from my own little gig (Thursdays at Attica) and anticipating my next "Big Night" (James Lavelle, Zouk, 18.9.04), perhaps a more interesting question is, what spurs people to play "other people's" music in a live context? Why, when most would rather just go out with their friends, drink and dance, would you instead lug 200 records or CDs to a smoky club every week, sit isolated from the world in a booth and risk the wrath of drunken strangers and a musical genius who requests "Sing Hallelujah" every week? Fools, I say.

I often turn to the idea in the art world of the "Perfect Installation", whereby the artist is giving a darkened room, and can install each and every element from light, sound, smell and temperature, to bring the participant to whatever new level of experience they like. Playing tunes is like that; you are controlling the joy-stick on a room full of potential mood-swings. By mixing the music of so many great artists in a particular order, you take people on a "shaky but fun" ride where you alone write the rules.

Which explains sod all, I know. It really is just for the chicks.

But I think when you dig down, the other important thing that DJ culture expresses is just how safe and trite the commercial music world is, and how controlled by music's lowest common denominator. In a situation where terrible-crap-from-the-80s-never-dies-it-just-moves-to-Singapore, it's no wonder people will pay $35 bucks to go and hear what's actually possible in the global mosh-pit of musical expression. It's because the radio is so crap here – or more to the point, it's because the taste of a mass market needed to run a radio station here is judged to be so strictly middle of the road. If it continues, Phil Collins will still be considered a star in Singapore when he's singing live from a rest home with his collostomy bag hanging from the mike stand.

Back in November 1987, Danny Rampling and Carl Cox decided it was worth playing their music to their mates, and henceforth Shoom! nights heralded the dawn of Acid House. The party had started. In London, radio in time caught up, and now in any given living room in England, house parties are breaking out to the back-drop of clinking Absolut bottles and Radio 1.

What if radio here became more about style-leading than demographic slavery? Certainly it would be interesting. But is this hard-working nation ready to handle un-zoned celebration breaking out in the suburbs? Would Pasir Ris ever be the same again.

Time will tell, and it'll soon be put to the test. That's the one thing I can guarantee you in my play list. And another is, if you think good radio is ever going to replace DJs, just remember who's going be back there somewhere in a darkened studio, twiddling those knobs. Bahaha.....