December 2011
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-25) →
The Joy Formidable (16)
Walls (8)
Charli XCX (7)
R.E.M. (4)
Roll The Dice (4)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
“I have my account linked to my phone, so it’s really easy,” said Tiffany...”
– A pretty hilarious NYT story about online retailers who are targeting drunken shoppers buying stuff after going to the bar. PS - I have totally done this and been surprised on Tuesday when a package arrives and I can’t remember what I ordered.
Online Retailers Home In on a New Demographic - The...
Postscript
The death of Diana is also the last big news event I remember as being “pre-Internet”.
(I was online but I wasn’t using it for any news filtering)
The particular near-physical urge to react (even if it’s by disavowing reaction) which felt kind of foreign in 1997 has since become rather more familiar.
Chains, Whips etc.
Are there any GOOD songs about S&M?
ESS ESS ESS AND PLEASE KILL ME →
My indelible memory of “S & M” is hearing it played as part of the soundtrack for the kids’ pilates workout at my four-year-old’s school summer fete. I thought this was very funny which probably makes me a Bad Parent.
(I don’t mind this song TBH, it’s not very good but it didn’t infuriate me.)
Christmas Loot
Head Massager thingy (looks like an egg whisk - is amazingly effective and this is speaking as someone very wary of massages/relaxation techniques)
Dr Who, The Seeds Of Doom DVD (“Let us play in my GREEN CATHEDRAL” &c)
Owen Hatherley, New Ruins Of Great Britain paperback (from wishlist)
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not A Gadget paperback (from wishlist - sort of feel I have to read...
Happy Christmas
About to embark on children’s bedroom stocking extraction mission. Fingers crossed. Have a good one, Tumblr.
my second Sound of the City roundtable column is... →
katherinestasaph:
In which I end up talking about Take Care after all. I blame Slate.
And I hit my word count about 80% through, so I’ll say here that it’s been really fantastic to take part in this! (Also, I just read Tom’s piece — he’s up next — and I’ll also say that it’s equally fantastic, not that that’s much of a spoiler.)
My piece is now up too - talking about getting old, retromania,...
When I try to submit P&J I get This Poll Is Now...
koganbot:
Know anything about this?
Maura’s said on Twitter this is a known issue and is being resolved, so don’t worry!
Best Essay about Comics in 2011 →
twiststreet:
USA Today actually published the perfect summation of what comics looked like in my head in 2011. It is … perfect in ways I could never hope to achieve. I could never come close to this. I’m… I’m envious of this.
It’s a list of “36 of the best things that happened in comics” — 36! sure, why not?— punctuated with cliches like “epic epicness” and “nuff said”, repeating marketing...
2011
barthel:
The year in which “you’re just doing it for the pageviews” became the new “you’re just pretending you like it.”
Zing!
2012 Best Music Writing →
o-song:
Right now, the (newly independent) annual Best Music Writing series of books is looking for nominations of music writing from 2011. If you read this blog, you probably read a lot of music articles this year, because I linked to 8 pieces of music writing a week in my ‘Music Dump’ series on the Vine. So if some of these really did it for you, nominate!
(I also wrote some things if you...
Anonymous asked: I *haaaaardly* think it's the fault of rock critics that black people failed to produce any other good music in 2003.
I wonder what other r&b records from 2011 those...
maura:
Sorry if this sounds snobby! It’s just, ugh, this is all reminding me of how Eminem gets airplay on rock stations. Cultural signifiers and aesthetic preferences becoming confused and elevating stuff for possibly weird reasons.
One of my favourite ever ILX moments (and favourite rockcrit moments!) was when Nate P listed - w/o much editorial context and no real-finger pointing* - all the...
Sinead O'Connor Sold Me Some Books
rockandrolltedium:
I was working in the Music & Video Exchange bookshop and Sinead O’Connor came in, she had some books to sell. They were mostly review copies of books people sent her on religion or feminism. I offered her an OK price and asked for ID. She sent her bodyguard out to get her ID. It said “Sinead O’Connor”.
by Tom Ewing
So honoured!
1 tag
“Media products act like solidarity goods – a permanent economic class of goods...”
– - Faris Yakob
For people who liked my final Poptimist column, this quote is the “replication” perspective in a nutshell. Not that it doesn’t apply to imitative stuff too, but if this is the criteria for value and worth, then things that spread by imitation will always be less...
bowielovesbeyonce asked: So what is the Christmas carol canon in Britain, then? I had no idea it was formed so much later. (Interestingly, three of the most popular Christmas songs from that time period here in the States happen to be British in origin: Happy Xmas (War Is Over), Last Christmas, and Do They Know It's Christmas?. With the exception of maybe Mariah's All I Want for Christmas Is You, I don't...
"Commercial radio—a free alternative to buying... →
marathonpacks:
At the Atlantic, I briefly respond to xkcd’s Christmas-canon-as-boomer-nostalgia comic. There are other (obvious) reasons the canon stops accepting new members in the early 60s.
One interesting thing abt this is that there exists a useful control group, i.e. Britain* a country which enjoyed the same basic technological and social developments with a lag of only a few years but...
Good vzzzzzz Important →
What’s an Important Album? It’s an album that is perceived to be a momentous work of ambition, invention, and high artistic credibility before it is released, and then proves to actually be so, planting itself in a highly visible place in the culture and acting as a signifier for the year in retrospect. It’s the one album you can’t avoid hearing about at the end of the year to...
Sound Of The City Roundtable →
I am contributing to one of those pop roundtables! I love reading them, they are my second favourite* year end round up format, so I hope my contributions are good. My first one - up soon I guess - was written at 4.30 AM having been woken up by my 5 year old worrying about us dying. TIME FOR PJ HARVEY I said.
(I particularly like the clink-of-eggnog-glasses politeness of the critic-to-critic...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-18) →
The Buggles (12)
DHS (1)
Fall Out Boy (1)
Moby (1)
Nintendo (1)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
I had to borrow a ladder off one of Madness
rockandrolltedium:
I once borrowed a ladder from a member of Madness, not sure which one as they all look the same, but it wasn’t the one with a lot of hair. Was that the bass player? Well, it wasn’t him
by Brian Stevens
My favourite of many thrilling stories from this important new Tumblr.
Best albums of 2011, No 1: PJ Harvey - Let England... →
guardianmusic:
England did indeed shake this year to the sound of riots, protests and distant wars. No wonder, then, that PJ Harvey’s raw yet meticulously researched record hit a nerve
I understand why this was the angle in Kitty Empire’s piece (and on most PJH pieces in the round-ups) but also this wd have been my favourite record of the year even if nobody had rioted or occupied...
i am confused by certain descriptions of...
agrammar:
tomewing:
My sense with Kaputt is that it doesn’t travel particularly well: at least some of its power relies on a particular past, and on that past having particular overtones, and if that’s not so familiar or resonant it doesn’t work quite as well. Like, I didn’t listen to sax-y soft rock in the 80s but I didn’t NOT listen to it, it isn’t something which could ever code as horrible...
“One thing I find paradoxical is that highly numerate people, people in the...”
– (via rustbelts)
This is a really good point but in my experience there’s also an attitude among quants of distributional determinism: these distributions are the natural outcome of an interactive system and even if changing the rules to affect the parabolas were moral it is doomed to failure....
unbornwhiskey replied to your link: Introspective
immediately, from this description, I thought ‘Kaputt’ would be one of the records covered in this column. But I guess that’s less about ‘soul-searching’ than ‘a soul has been found and it is vaporous.’
It would have felt more tenuous even than the Drake inclusion :)
My sense with Kaputt is that it doesn’t travel particularly well: at...
Introspective →
Guardian column about the well-crafted private worlds of 2011’s most acclaimed records, none of which I actually like.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-11) →
Katy B (31)
2562 (11)
Jon Brooks (10)
The Maytals (9)
The Jesus and Mary Chain (7)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
jrichmanesq replied to your link: Meanwhile In Commentland…
amazing that folks are already using that NPR piece as a blueprint for their comic meta-commentary. i mean, that’s what’s happening here, right?
My only tiny disappointment with the comments thread is that nobody’s said we should be thrown off Metacritic yet.
maura replied to your link: Meanwhile In Commentland…
WILL BON IVER TAKE IT BACK FOR WHITEY
Polly Harvey will, I think. Bon Iver was #5, since we don’t have log cabins or Kanye West in Britain.
Meanwhile In Commentland... →
The Guardian’s Top 5 albums of the year has been majority pop/R&B (Beyonce at 4, Frank Ocean at 3, Katy B at 2). The commenters are, shall we say, restless.
(If you want to know what I think of the Katy B record, I wrote it up in the Pitchfork end-of-year list, where it Knows Its Place in the demure mid-30s. But secretly it IS the second-best album of the year, so there.)
1 tag
You are reading the work of the fifth-best market...
I am reminded of how The Housemartins used to bill themselves “the fourth-best band in Hull”.
burnyourhits asked: Now that the great Poptimist project has wrapped up, any chance the fine folks at Pitchfork would consider collecting them all as a Poptimist book? Pretty sure I've already read them all, but I'd love to see that title on my bookshelf.
Ten Reasons Why Donna Summer Belongs In The Rock... →
There’s something admirable (because surely deliberate) about the fact the writer has managed this without a single mention of “I Feel Love”.
*I know this is the worst kind of piece, but just forget the HOF and read it as a piece about why Donna Summer is awesome if you like.
“Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer...”
– Okay, I know I’ve recommended him before, but I’m jumping of the Farhad Manjoo bandwagon. Not just because he prefers Amazon shopping to local bookstores—that’s well within the mainstream of course—but because his logic is so anti-intellectual, to use Amazon’s own M.O. to defend its impact on book...
You: The Protester
marathonpacks:
I was ready to go H.A.M. on Time for copping out and condescending to American audiences, mushing together the brutal visceral reality that is war and political dissent into one puffy word-clouded (neutralized) “protester”—the “You” of 2011—until a quick Google set me straight.
1950: The American Fighting Man
1956: The Hungarian Freedom Fighter
1960: American Scientists
1966:...
Records Ketchup 2011
Blanck Mass - Blanck Mass: Not sure what foolery kept me from listening to this before - side project of the guys from Fuck Buttons, minus beats plus even more cosmic new age WEIGHT. Carl Sagan meets the Space Vikings, very satisfying and accessible drift. No lyrics hurrah.
Kuedo - Severance: A sad nobility to this one, skittery beats underneath cold marble melodics - it’s good and deserves...
thirstinmore asked: Hey, Tom - just wanted to express my gratitude for your Poptimist column. I know it's dead now, but over the years I've really enjoyed your perspective, and the "poptimist" outlook in general. Stumbled upon your blog via the "music website chosen something unacceptable" post, which is (not surprisingly) spot-on. Great work!
A MUSIC WEBSITE HAS CHOSEN SOMETHING UNACCEPTABLE...
It’s OK, don’t worry. I know it seems difficult to understand right now, but the first thing you need to realise is that what you’re feeling is normal. A lot of people are going through the same process you are. What’s more, a lot of people have gone through it before and come out OK. Music sites have been praising hit songs by women, or albums which didn’t break 75...