From the album “Long Mile Works” (2021)
Holy Jesus, Premier League football is back already and that means the summer is nearly over. I’ll confess I enjoyed the three-month break from organizing my schedule around live football. But now we’re back to normality – nine months of stupid kick-off times, cringeworthy Sky hyperbole, demoralizing forms of geopolitical sportswashing and brazen corporate cheating being ignored for the sake of tribalism, crap commentary and punditry from second rate ex-players, Rod “who ran away and left his wife for a young’un” Liddle moaning about the promotion of women’s football and women generally, an oppressive abundance of corporate advertising and product placement, billions of impressions on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok to be farmed and fought for and mass fawning over displays of grotesque opulence and financial profligacy while match-going fans get gouged. But apart from all that – we fucking love it, don’t we?
I used to hope that the power of proper football returning – nobody cares about the abomination that was the Club World Cup – could stymie some from participating in the uglier social and political pre-occupations of the day. Thankfully most football fans sequester their politics from their football support or place the latter well above the former. We seldom see the overtly populist bullshit immigrant and Muslim demonization in and around football (especially if those immigrants and Muslims are high priced signings for your football club) that’s now so depressingly prevalent online (Rupert Lowe is a thick racist twat) and in the news. There’s also scant support on the terraces for the media and political class wingnuts harping on about petty culture war shite, which is another device to distract us the from the ongoing current economic extortion by their super-rich benefactors. In fact, the hyper-inflation in football, especially through ticket pricing, is one of the main venues where ordinary folk are visibly biting back, via protests, against the contemptuous greed of the rentier class.
Of less importance, will matches that matter reduce participation in the most depressing and degrading contemporary social media vices? Sadly, it’s baked in now that we get the worst of both worlds when games are on whilst the transfer window is still open. Who doesn’t love the perpetual mass displays of childish pathos when a defeat or draw occurs, the growing obsession with winning transfer windows, idiotic catastrophizing when they don’t (see Liverpool last season), fans of rival clubs gleaning genuine joy from reading inane whiny tweets from fans of rival clubs, the insatiable need to be seen to be right on the internet when arguing with avatars and strangers and simply not being good enough to ignore provocative clickbait tweets from cynical aggregator and or banter accounts with Stake sponsorships. My opinion of this dismal sub-culture, particularly those who populate it, is applicable to an acrimonious scenario from the brilliantly astute Deadwood, “we live life however we choose” a character offers as a banal appeasement, which elicits a deservedly hostile response “and you choose life as a cunt”.
Before we get to this season’s predictions a quick recap of my calamitous predictions from 2024/25, because this column exists for self-flagellation via humiliation. The only successes were Newcastle United getting Champions League football, albeit by finishing fifth, not fourth as I predicted, and Arsenal finishing second. Not that the latter is one to brag about. They’ve done that in each of the last three seasons.
As per usual I’ll pick the three who’ll be relegated, go over the Champions League contenders and pretenders and who’ll win the league – none of which I ever get right. Google tells me the opposite of the Midas touch is the Sadim touch, where everything you touch is ruined. At least this year I’ve acquired some knowledge while writing two-thousand words of nonsense.
Relegation:
When it comes to figuring out relegation having a predilection for shorter term trends, in this case a growing belief that the gulf in quality between the Championship and the Premier League grows every year, may be wise. Or at least wiser than a muppet using the percentage of promoted clubs staying up in the Premier League era, starting from the early nineties, to support the belief that one of them must survive, or was statistically likely to. And yeah, that muppet was me.
All three of the newly promoted sides have been relegated in each of the last two seasons, and not only that, with weeks to spare. Sunderland may have spent £100m, but Ipswich also spent heavily and went straight back down last season. The promoted sides are so comparatively weak that spending £100m guarantees nothing, well, it probably prevents them being as historically awful as Derby County accruing only eleven points in 2006/07.
Logic dictates that if nothing is guaranteed it’s not certain that this two-year run will become three and cement it as a trend. But it’s not just one of the promoted sides being good enough to compete, one of the ensconced Premier League teams has to drop off, significantly.
The best candidate is Brentford. Selling your top two goalscorers and replacing Thomas Frank with a set piece coach who has never managed before is a strategy that could easily dice with disaster. Everton and Wolves have been perennially woeful. Both sacked their managers in the middle of last season yet survived easily. Crystal Palace’s squad depth has been pared down aggressively and Glasner isn’t having it, but Palace going down? I’m not having that either.
It’ll be the three promoted sides for the chop again. It’s becoming boring. If we’re lucky we’ll get a decent dogfight till the end this season.
Top Four (maybe five?) and Thursday Night Wankers:
While it was welcome to see Nottingham Forest interloping in the fight for Champions League football, it was also clear that they were over their skis. This happens every decade or so – club avoids injuries, has a centre forward who goes on a hot streak, they defend a slender lead well with a low block, counter attack effectively, and win games they should draw, and draw games they should lose. It’s a formula that served Ipswich Town well in the mid-2000’s and most impressively and improbably of all Leicester City in 2016.
I’m not expecting any surprises in the European contenders this time. Amusing as it was to witness the calamitous league campaigns Spurs and Manchester United served up last season, the former hiring someone who actually subscribes to discipline and pragmatism in Thomas Frank and the latter spending £200m on forwards (just how much were the dinner ladies, admin team and cleaning staff getting paid at Carrington?) should restore them to top half respectability. While I’m not expecting either to challenge for the top four (or five) beyond February, they should contend with Villa and Brighton for the Europa League spots.
The top four faller will be Newcastle – it’s been a clown show all summer. The Saudis appear to be more invested in funding the transfer pyramid scheme at Chelsea through a minority stake. The horse punchers have no director of football, seem incapable of getting good players wanted by other top clubs to join them, their best player has downed tools and will probably exit before the end of the window and Jason “knockoff Patrick Bateman” Tindall is still using sunbeds in July. Eddie Howe to be beheaded by November.
The other prediction that I’m convinced of – Chelsea will finish above Arsenal, but neither will meaningfully challenge for the title. Despite Chelsea spending well over a billion quid (over fifty new players signed in three years) since Roman Abramovich was sanctioned, somehow the comatose Robert Sanchez is still in goal and they’ve accumulated a glut of unconvincing central defensive options. The greater weight of narrative expectation is clearly on Arsenal, from both their own fans and media after three runner-up finishes. This has to be the year, blood. While Viktor Gyökeres has flop written all over him, their big problem is still Mikel Arteta. Brattish metrosexuals may be a dislikable cohort (and it gave us that Ibiza Final Boss meme that became tiresome within five minutes), but good old Mikel just has to be a full-on fucking cunt too. It’s fitting that his behaviour is reflected in his tactics – insecure, defensive and cynical. His comments after Arsenal were comfortably eliminated by PSG in the Champions League semi-finals showed a worrying lack of humility and inability to introspect. Attributes that may come in handy when trying to decipher how to go from perpetual second place finishes to first.
My hostility is also informed by Arsenal having become a frustrating watch. They’re more than capable of playing with verve and potency, but instead they spend too much time focusing on the dark arts to their detriment; playing for fouls and corners, diving, moaning at referees and using a favorite weapon of that football genius Tony Pulis – long throws. There’s a lack of nerve too, when doubt creeps in they often retreat into a low block defensive posture. Until this crap changes I simply can’t see them winning the title, and it likely won’t until Arteta is replaced. Given how generously he’s been backed with time and money, a fourth placed finish and another trophyless season will surely see him in trouble.
Speaking of trouble, Manchester City continue to operate as though the charges levied against them by the Premier League for financial impropriety simply never happened. And you know what, I’m starting to think they could be right. Will we ever get a verdict?
A verdict about their team is easier – until last season’s decline the existing treble winning spine was able to cover up for the dirty wee secret that their recent recruitment, Erling Haaland aside, had been so unremarkable. Grealish has completely flopped, see what I did there? Guardiola seems incapable of identifying a viable right back to save his life. Doku and Savinho aren’t anywhere near the level of Mahrez or a prime Bernardo Silva. Allowing Julian Alvarez to leave last summer without a replacement was pure hubris.
Rodri returning will bolster confidence and Omar Marmoush has already shown himself to be far more incisive than the other dozen attacking midfielders on the books. It would also help if Phil Foden can remember he’s quite good at football.
So why second? Well, the defending champions are just better, particularly in goal, and have, on paper, gotten better in attack than last year’s successful version.
Champions:
I hadn’t heard of Arne Slot just over a year ago. We’d just had the Erik ten Hag experience too. Bald Dutch managers coming straight from the Eredivisie felt as reliable as hiring Ghislane Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein to run an all-girls boarding school.
Stranger still, Liverpool spent little, won the league and have now broken the English transfer record. This isn’t the order in which success is achieved according to the experts on social media. Slot’s achievement is even more impressive than Arsene Wenger coming from being Big In Japan and winning the league in his first full season. Wenger arrived at Arsenal a few weeks into the 1996-97 season, giving him the benefit of almost a full year to bed in and get the measure of things. Slot was taking over from the messianic Jürgen Klopp too, but he made it all look straightforward. It proves that having the right manager or head coach paired with a cogent transfer strategy still matters more than spending gazillions.
The only doubts here is a catastrophic age related drop off for Van Dijk and Salah, a cluster of injuries in one position, or making too many personnel changes to a winning formula. We’re at roughly two-thousand words now, so I’ll stop before I talk myself out of picking them to repeat.
Predicted Table:
1. Liverpool
2. Manchester City
3. Chelsea
4. Arsenal
5. Aston Villa
6. Manchester United
7. Brighton & Hove Albion
8. Tottenham Hotspur
9. Newcastle United
10. Nottingham Forest
11. Bournemouth
12. Fulham
13. West Ham United
14. Crystal Palace
15. Everton
16. Wolverhampton Wanderers
17. Brentford
18. Leeds United
19. Sunderland
20. Burnley
From the album “India Man” (2024)
From the album “Seed Of Memory” (1976)
There’s been a cluster of celebrity deaths in the last week or so; Ozzy Osbourne, Hulk Hogan and Donald Trump’s political career (who said Jeffrey Epstein was all bad?). The death of Daniel Dumile, aka MF Doom, a few years ago, went largely unnoticed outside the heads, and is one, along with Ozzy, that deserved to be lamented (even the dwarves mourn Ozzy, what a character he was). I mention this because lately I’ve been on an MF Doom binge, and it occurred to me that while Dumile was a lyrical shaman, the beats to go with his rhymes also deserve more love than they tend to get. This is where Special Herbs Volumes 0-9 comes in.
It begs the question as to why sampling a song and refashioning it well is a vastly underrated skill. As a genre, hip-hop instrumentals (even J Dilla’s, or say those on De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising) are largely perceived as an afterthought. It’s somewhat logical that they’re seen this way, not for (mostly) being created using samples, but as a rap track that’s incomplete.
My gripe here is the inconsistency often applied to perceived forms of incompleteness. Even if they don’t appear on the final album version, some of the best versions of songs by the Beatles, the Stones and Van Morrison, to name but a few, are live, from bootlegs or of the songs during their infancy, and are not seen as inferior compared to the final album version. The partial intent of the final studio version on an album is to cloak improvisation and the creative process, akin to concealing the execution of the magic trick. Dumile’s rhymes and flow cannot be denied, but here it takes their removal to elevate the instrumental, so it’s understandable that measure would be viewed as counter-intuitive to appreciating something’s value.
Special Herbs biggest appeal for me is operating as a full-scale descent into musical nerdiness. It’s akin to train spotting, without the need to don an anorak. All the songs sampled by MF Grimm and chosen by Dumile, beats which form the backbones of his albums Mm…Food and Operation Doomsday, are bonafide funk and jazz classics from mostly sixties and seventies soul, and of course, lots of Sade. Some of these are obvious, say “Calamus Root” which is formed from “Black Cow” by Steely Dan. “All Spice” and “Saffron” are both Sade offerings – “Is It a Crime” and “Kiss of Life” respectively. Everyone has their favourite part or section of a song, and so many of the Special Herbs’ samples have a tendency to find the most satisfying part. Looping a portion near the end of “Kiss of Life” by Sade, after the sax and vocal clears out, ushering in the outro, with the cooing backing vocal taking prominence, is inspired.
“Benzoin Gum” can only have come from Isaac Hayes’ “Walk On By”. “Monosodium Glutamate” repeats a sped-up bridge section towards the end of “One Hundred Ways” by Quincy Jones giving it a cheeky exuberance, that belies the original ballad – thankfully this conversion slaps, which is the opposite of Christopher Nolan’s terrible Oppenheimer, which is a somehow irritatingly pedestrian portentous watch but with dialogue of a YouTube video playing at 1.5X speed. “Licorice” repurposes a section of “All I Ask” by the Blackbyrds while “Mandrake” utilizes fragments of “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers to satisfying effect.
Others, such as “Hyssop”, threw me for a loop by sampling more than one song. A shard of “I Can’t Go For That” By Hall and Oates is easily recognised, while its more obscure partner “Dark Shadows Theme” by Robert Cobert Orchestra completely stumped me. Fortunately, Google exists, and this Spotify playlist extensively covers most of the tracks sampled. The beat for the sublime “Deep Fried Frenz” is titled “Myrrh” and was harvested from “No Stranger To Love” by Roy Ayers. Even if you can be made to feel a heathen for not being able to spot that one, as I was, the process as a whole is a brilliant way of discovering new stuff – “Na Boca do Sol” by Arthur Verocai was a nice wee find, and I was introduced to a multitude of Ronnie Laws’ stuff which is copiously sampled on Special Herbs.
Still, despite my advocacy and love of this gear, I succumb to momentary doubts. Is the creation of samples somewhat random and fortuitous? Is there a 99% failure rate? I pose this question as I had a go myself. You know when you get a vinyl, then curiosity or boredom arrives and in a fit of delusion you think, what the heck? Let’s pitch it down. Often, this provides calamitous outcomes, but occasionally it surprises. “Substance” by Bocca Juniors sounds better slightly slower, especially the vocal. Rarer still a change of speed can be enough to make a record, or a section of it, sound completely new. My inability to parse, or sample, anything worthwhile from the vinyl records I own leads me to believe that sampling is likely innate and requires a similar level of refinement or expertise as crafting songs from scratch. Whether sampled (or referenced) directly or indirectly, all art is derivative to a degree, but even so there will be snobs who’ll forget this and bristle at me putting that creative process on a par with Bob Dylan, Lenny Cohen, John and Paul and Mick and Keith.
A final suggestion. All of the instrumentals come fused together in three mixes (Special Herbs Volumes 0-9), or as individual tracks (in separate albums; 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8 and 9-0). I advocate getting both, but the latter form is a must. It allows you can curate your own favourite MF Doom instrumentals tracklist, many replete with those irresistible comic book interludes, in the order you desire. This is clearly not as hard as conjuring a kicking beat from a sample, but, given the quality of the source, it allows access to a rewarding creative process for us mere mortals.
Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard 
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