Revelation of the day

The Board is putting aside his dislike of Dublin, international soccer and Robbie Keane and will be in Croke Park for the Bulgaria match tomorrow.

The Board is also off work until Wednesday, and will be revealing little else forthwith.

Lazy town

Because I'm a) too insanely busy to write an actual blog post today and b) because the Limerick Leader's usual music writer On The Beat smells and is on holiday, The Board is posting his preview in this week's paper for Akil The MC's solo set in the Belltable on Friday.

Akil, of course, is a founding member of Jurassic Five. The Board, as some of you may have gathered from his earlier post on the topic, likes them a lot. I don't find that to be unethical. No no. And don't worry, The board's brief flirtation with music journalism will be mercifully brief. On The Beat is back next week.


TIME, culture and economics were all fairly cruel to Los Angeles rap collective Jurassic Five, the superstars who never were.

In the late 1990s, after almost 10 years of being bludgeoned by the likes of Ice Cube, the ears of South Central became tuned to an oddly polished brand of post-revival ensemble hip hop. For a group formed in a health store, of all places, Jurassic Five’s 1997 debut EP was an underground joy, dripping with simple beats, cut and paste samples and thinking-man’s lyrical interplay.

It was a hip hop fusion that carried through their ten years together, and is one that will be on display at the Belltable this Friday as founding member Akil The MC performs a highly anticipated solo set.

Jurassic Five weren’t quite a bolt from the blue - the groundwork had been laid years before by A Tribe Called Quest’s seminal ‘Midnight Marauders’ and those pioneers of the genre, De La Soul. But their breakthrough track ‘Concrete Schoolyard’ was equal parts fresh and disarmingly nostalgic, and the group offering “playground tactics/no rabbit in a hat tricks” seemed poised to take hip hop to a smoother place.

But Eminem was about to release the Marshall Mathers LP, and a rap genre that had become pointy and confrontational in the mid 1990s was about to become blissfully mainstream. J5 members Chali 2na, Akil, Soup, Mark 7even, DJ Nu-Mark and DJ Cut Chemist were about to find themselves in the right place at the wrong time.

Word of mouth ensured a full release for their debut EP in December 1998 on Pan Records, and in June 2000 Interscope published their second studio work ‘Quality Control’. Despite weaving together deceptively slick production, social commentary and left field samples - as well as containing the menacing masterpiece ‘Contribution’ - Quality Control was blighted from the start.

The group always had an awkward relationship with Interscope, complaining that the label were attempting to shoe-horn their style into places where it wouldn’t fit. (Prior to releasing ‘Quality Control’ one record company official is reported to have demanded more “Southern jigga-boo” beats).

Still, their creativity peaked with 2002 release ‘Power In Numbers’, which reached number 15 in the US Billboard 200. It was a spell binding record which could have easily been packaged as a concept album, so perfectly did it capture the grief, smooth life and lazy love of black man in modern LA.

2006’s ‘Feedback’ was equally successful commercially, but was met with a lukewarm reaction from critics. By this stage DJ Cut Chemist had left the group and their balance seemed to suffer, with collaborations with Nelly Furtado and the Dave Matthews Band sounding like the product of a group in search of a way.

They split in ambiguous circumstances in February 2007. This Friday founding member Akil performs a solo set at the Belltable on Cecil Street, where he will combine smidgens of his recent solo work with the likes of DJ Format and Japan’s DJ Yuktaka with a blend of J5 staples.

Revelation of the day

The Board utterly despises Bell X1.

It's cynical happy-go-lucky tripe that only aims to get female first year business students drunk and swoony.

Go away. Now.

The wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong idea

The international banking crisis has become the first phoney war of the 21st century.

Just like Europe in 1913, propaganda and ignorance on the part of the powers that be is clouding any attempt at tackling a deep-seated and poisonous problem, and we are all suffering because of it.

Tanaiste Mary Coughlan is calling for Irish Nationwide CEO Michael Fingleton to return a €1 million bonus, in line with the Government's new, seemingly morally superior code on pay for bank executives following the State guarantee.

Once more, this is just the Government emitting hot air. Once more, it is Minister Coughlan who is responsible for it.

All over the developed world (excluding Canada, of course) senior bankers are being subjected to nothing short of a witch hunt. What is most unsettling is that this mass vilification is being backed, legitimised and encouraged by governments.

Senior bankers deserve little clemency from anyone, of course. The more we learn, the more we have come to realise that the dispensing of bad credit and seepage of toxic debt was derived from greed and irresponsibility by the people who were in charge of our money.

But with our exchequer bleeding and the toughest budget since The Emergency likely to come in the coming weeks, the last thing we need is this sort of mindless populism from the Tanaiste.

Wasting time, effort and what little political capital the Government has left going after individual bankers shows a clear lack of ideas and leadership.

Making Fingleton hand back his bonus will not fix the shocking lack of regulation in Irish banking that let men like him award themselves this money in the first place. But crippling bank CEO's wages will only serve to ensure that the best people for these jobs will look elsewhere when asked to take up the stewardship of our banks in the medium and long term.

There is no joined up thinking here.

This Government, bereft as they are of popular support, have been reduced to dispensing soundbites that play on the anger and confusion of ordinary people towards the banks.

Because the ineptitude of Minister Coughlan and her cabinet colleagues becomes clear with even the slightest scrutiny, they are determined to direct the eyes and the fury of the Irish people at anyone but themselves.

Revelation of the day

In the first of a pseudo-regular feature, The Board admits that he loves Alphabeat.

Deal with it.

The boy with the thorn in his side

The cosmic truth is finally upon us. Stephen Jones, rugby correspondent with the Sunday Times, is insane.

Having read his British and Irish Lions selection, which includes only two Irishmen (who aren't Paul O'Connell and Brian O'Driscoll, by the way), his madness can no longer be disputed.

As a nation we must ask ourselves some pertinent questions. Growing up in Newport, was Jones bullied in primary school by an Irish child? Perhaps his first car was stolen by an Irishman, drenched in green paint, driven to Cardiff and thrown into the River Taff?

His utter dislike of the Irish and his blindness to the talents of our rugby players can only come from some hidden well of childhood grief.

The Board has another theory. Stand up and Fight, the editor of the Limerick Leader, once worked with Jones at the Times. Perhaps it was he, through some grievance of water coolers or red biro scarcity, who created this Welshman's bitterness towards the glory of our land.

If you, too, are fed up of being turned into a molten pot of rage every Sunday morning, feel free to direct your anger to standupandfight@limerickleader.ie.

Consider it an exercise in anger management.

P.S. The Board has thrown down the gauntlet to The Hogespot, who claims to know something about rugby because he can throw a tyre around Kilballyowen, to pick a Lions XV.

The criteria, crucially, is not to pick a Home Nations XV a la Championship Manager. The team must be one that can deal with the speedy South African backs, their lumberjack pack, and the High Veld.

The man who has the most correct selections come the first test is to reward the other with a mountain of gold bullion and the keys to a brand new, pre-owned Daewoo Matiz.

I'm excited already.

1. Alastair Dickinson (Scotland)

2. Rory Best (Ireland)

3. Euan Murray (Scotland)

4. Paul O'Connell (Ireland, captain)

5. Alun Wyn-Jones (Wales)

6. Ryan Jones (Wales)

7. David Wallace (Ireland)

8. Jamie Heaslip (Ireland)

9. Dwayne Peel (Wales)

10. Stephen Jones (Wales)

11. Shane Williams (Wales)

12. Riki Flutey (England)

13. Brian O'Driscoll (Ireland)

14. Luke Fitzgerald (Ireland)

15. Lee Byrne (Wales)

Have at thee, Hogan.

Rule Britannia

The Board is disappointed that for all the literature in our blood and the wit on our tongues, we Irish have still not found a slogan for these times of guilt and recession.

Usually, the world reveals itself to a Celt once he is staring at his own doom. Bagenal Harvey and the pikes. Oscar Wilde and the curtains.

Yet here we are, in the land of uber-branding, a place where a man's posters say more than his words ever will, and we're still waiting on the punch line.

Were Bernard Manning not a) British and b) dead, he would give us a one liner about dirty Poles, a fat man's chuckle and some fatherly reassurance.

Don't ever let them stop you laughing, son.

However The Board is now tired of waiting for the Irish to make a t-shirt of George Lee's face above Richard Pryor's line of defiance: "I ain't dead yet, motherf*cker"

As such, he has decided to join his former English brethren by purchasing a 'Keep Calm And Carry On' t-shirt, having read about them with glee in yesterday's Guardian.

The Board grew up in London, so when the occasion warrants it he can get away with trimming in behind some wartime austerity from Her Majesty.

Carry on, indeed.