January 2009
Fred Rich And His Orchestra - “Wedding...
Are you also frightened?
People assuming that you don’t actually like what you like is a MASSIVE pain in the arse: happens to me a lot, and it’s one of the things I hate most about music discourse too. But honestly, it’s always going to happen, and it’s not going to lead to a world where everyone is too afraid to like anything, especially not when the band in question is the most critically...
Ginuwine - “What’s So...
10 Years Of Freaky Trigger →
Freaky Trigger is ten (well, in 60 days or so it is). I’ll be linking on FT to one article/post from every month of its history, and providing a bit of commentary. THE SECRET ORIGIN OF THE BLOGOSPHERE!
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/tag/ft-is-10/ - this is the page to go if you just want the reposted content as I select it and not the waffle. Not all of it will be by me, and not all of it will...
Deluxe Magazine's Top 100 Albums list →
This list dates from 1998, from the short lived men’s magazine for post-Britpop fops, Deluxe. It is the only “men’s magazine” I have ever bought, apart from porno ones in my teens. Anyway this list - more the approach to it than the actual contents of it, though obviously I agreed with most of those too - impressed me hugely. Enough to go to the bother of typing it up on...
Third Fourth And Fifth Thoughts On Final Crisis
(Mild apologies to those readers of my tumblr who don’t give a monkey’s about superhero comics. If tumblr had an equivalent of LJ-cut, I’d be using it now!)
3. If you read Final Crisis as a 7-issue miniseries, it will be great but jumpy and with a completely WTF ending. If, however, you read it as a 12-issue miniseries (like the original Crisis) - as I did last night - it is...
Thomas Bangalter and DJ Falcon - “I Got So...
First thought after reading Final Crisis #7
Can I have a BATMAN BC miniseries please?
barthel:
towerofsleep:
Little Girls -...
Sharing Is Creepy →
I linked this on Blackbeardblog but I know it chimes with some wider interests on this flist too. (My link shd not be taken as an endorsement of these ideas! But I thihk they’re interesting.)
Revolting Cocks - “Beers, Steers and...
500: 64-77 →
Liveblogging the Pitchfork 500 - you know the drill by know I guess! This episode mostly covers the birth of hip-hop (as seen through the P4K Selecta’s collective eye).
Saint Etienne - "Method Of Modern Love" →
Really like this - my favourite thing of theirs for ages! (listen to it at the My Chemical Toilet post linked)
Green Velvet - “Preacherman”:...
Boys Town Gang - “Can’t Take My Eyes...
pgwp:
thisismyfavoritesong:
“Bam Bam” by The...
Twitter is the new MySpace (and here's its Sandi... →
I have 0 against Georgia Wonder, but I think this press release is a bit disingenuous - being in the Top 20 on Pirate Bay is SURELY not the same thing as “being in the Top 20 Shared Music in the World”. Firstly there are a lot of other torrent sites - PB is the most famous but I’m not even sure it’s the most used - and that’s even before you start thinking about...
Playing The Beatles Backwards: The Ultimate... →
offnotesnotes:
(via wasted-efforts)
I marked this down as “liked” but I realised I didn’t really like it. I respected its discipline I guess but “A collection of received wisdom about The Beatles” would be a better title!
Illusion - “Wind Of Change”: The...
The Death Of The Download →
“24 percent of UK internet users listen to streaming audio. 9 percent of UK internet users buy paid downloads.”
This will get even wider if Spotify manages to scale up. Interesting that this appears on the same day as Dorian Lynskey’s piece on the charts.
A new golden age for the charts? →
A nice mention for Freaky Trigger here too! Dorian Lynskey is picking up on my analysis here, though what I interpret as a bust he reckons is a market correction.
China Censors Obama’s Speech →
(via offnotesnotes)
I’m kind of amazed it was being shown live on state Chinese TV in the first place!
(I wonder if Hu Jintao’s first national address was shown live on US TV ;))
Afrika Bambaataa and Family -...
It's Pazz and Jop time!
perpetua:
The Village Voice’s critics poll is online. You can find my ballot here. Please don’t confuse my ballot with a year-end list — it’s not; it’s more about voting. I always seem to have a regret when looking at these things a month or so after I submit them, and this year it is that I did not vote for Max Tundra in the album category. Not that it would’ve really mattered, I guess....
Simon Reynolds *hearts* Vampire Weekend →
“They’ve merely outed the truth of indie, which was never really The People’s Music for all its affected sloppiness and “beautiful loser” tropes, instead always much more of an upper-middle-class milieu, the kids recoiling from the commercial and mass-produced just like their parents did via artisanal foodstuffs and antiques. In his Spin profile, Andy Greenwald...
The Fear →
BBC Chartblog is right that the Lily Allen single is a bit blunt if it’s just taken as a satire on sleb culture, but then “LDN” and “Smile” weren’t exactly masterpieces of Swiftian subtlety. They’re also right that it’s a terrific vocal performance* (and very catchy). I think it’s a little timelier than the celebrity angle on its own would...
2000 Year old lyrics →
“On the road I met a villager, ‘At my home what kin are there?’ ‘Look over there- that’s your home!’ Pine, cypress, burial mounds piled, piled high, Hares going in through dog-holes, Pheasants flying in through rafter tops; The inner garden grown wild with corn, Over the well wild mallow growing.”
Song lyrics from Han China, via History Is Made At Night
Inevitable as the dawn →
Almighty Records does not let me down on the “gay disco Hallelujah cover” front.
All Saints - “War Of Nerves”: No time...
33 things you never knew had names. →
cureforbedbugs:
tomewing:
maura:
OCTOTHORPE - The symbol ‘#’ on a telephone handset. Bell Labs’ engineer Don Macpherson created the word in the 1960s by combining octo-, as in eight, with the name of one of his favourite athletes, 1912 Olympic decathlon champion Jim Thorpe.
(via nervousacid / linkfilter)
B-b-but it has a name and the name is “the hash key”.
POUND! THE POUND KEY! Gah,...
33 things you never knew had names. →
maura:
OCTOTHORPE - The symbol ‘#’ on a telephone handset. Bell Labs’ engineer Don Macpherson created the word in the 1960s by combining octo-, as in eight, with the name of one of his favourite athletes, 1912 Olympic decathlon champion Jim Thorpe.
(via nervousacid / linkfilter)
B-b-but it has a name and the name is “the hash key”.
Ask: The Twitter Of Pop →
What Twitter has to say about pop. I enjoyed doing this (and it didn’t take an excruciatingly long time!) - it may become a regular feature.
Rosemary Clooney - “Mambo Italiano”: I...
Great News For All Our Readers →
I’m moving Blackbeardblog, my more occasional than it should be market research/social media (i.e. “work”) blog, onto a Tumblr, because I’m so comfortable with the interface here. This means that the infrequent socmed postings on this one will dry up, so it’ll be even more music-centric. By all means follow the new tumblr (link above), but it’ll be quite dry and...
Still thinking about Factory
The weird thing about Factory’s signings wasn’t that they failed to sign local bands like the Smiths and the Stone Roses (whose aesthetics both seem really un-Factory-ish to me), but that the label floundered so much when dance music got big, despite a) having a boss who evangelised for dance and bedroom techno (“Wake up America - you’re dead!”), b) owning a...
Guardian review of Factory Box Set →
“Heroically, Factory made little distinction between Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart and Crawling Chaos’s goofy, bonkers Sex Machine. The bottom line was that the world needed to hear them both.”
When a major label makes dreadful and misguided signings as well as perceptive and profitable ones, it’s either considered par for the course or an example of...
An attention Ponzi scheme →
“I’ve noticed that it’s not unusual for someone to follow over 500 people. I have a hard time believing that anyone pays that much attention to that many people?
Why would anyone follow that many people? The obvious reason is the expectation of reciprocity: following someone often leads to their following back. And many people want to have more followers, possibly as a status symbol, but...
somesongsconsidered:
“Let’s Make This Precious...
100 Great Pop Songs Of The 90s →
“I’ll be taking the opportunity to address, or at least counterbalance, what I think are faulty habits of thought and criticism that I’ve noticed when it comes to the music of the nineties, the decade above all others for which there exists no real critical or cultural consensus. Many of us are embarrassed by it all; we are not yet ready to find the nineties cool again, to admit it into the...
All Seeing I - “First Man In Space”:...
Pop Vox Again →
Marc argues the case for indie vocals well - and let me say right now that I LIKE a lot of indie voices. There’s a fairly obvious counter-argument, which is that “a performance designed to make you feel something” is a definition of acting as well as pop music, and there are plenty of non-naturalistic acting schools which thrive. A technique which registers as cliche is a...
WRITE OR DIE →
The idea of this tool is simple: stop writing for too long and your work starts to erase itself. NaNoWriMo dudes pay attention!