…which, frankly, I don’t do enough on this blog…this week’s Private Eye has a fantastic spoof ‘Billy Bragg’s Revised British Songbook’ in its Diary column (as written by Craig Brown). Sample lyrics include
Are you going to Scarborough Fair
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme;
Remember me to one who lived there
Cos Thatcherism brutally socialised her into a
life of inner-city crime
Uncut has done that really annoying thing of issuing two different covermount CDs this month: one is a collection of tracks from this year’s best new albums, the other from the best re-releases. If you’re a subscriber like me, you get what you’re given (re-releases in my case…which I didn’t want).
Of course, it’s a cunning trick to get you to buy two magazines instead of one (which I’ve done in the past, I have to admit), but it leaves me feeling most exploited..
I have generally been trying to get everyone to read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. In particular, I have been suggesting people buy it on iTMS and download it onto their iPods.
I mentioned this to one colleague at work who I knew received a 40Gb iPod for Xmas.
She said almost with a hint of mourning in her voice: ‘Oh, my iPod…’
A tale of woe follows about the fact that her glorious shiny eight month old iPod only had eight albums on it: and she’d sort of got fed up of listening to them over and over again. Too difficult. Too busy with the kids. Too little time.
Now, I had already given her my iPod starter pack: 20 CD Roms with MP3s burnt onto them. And, I know I should have walked away. However, I found myself for a second time last night, plugging someone else’s iPod into my PC and handing over all my musical worldly goods. I like to think she will be wowed by my amazing ‘eclectic’ taste, but I suggest she’ll just be slightly miffed that I’ve only got three Oasis tracks on there.
By co-incidence, stumbled across this thread on I Love Music, from someone who has done something similar, but had a slightly more violent reaction than myself
- So I had 100 gbs of (fairly hard to find) music that I’ve slowly collected over the past four years at college. The other day a friend of mine asked to copy it to an external drive and I agreed. Now I feel sick to my stomach and I can’t seem to stop hating my friend. Is this simple greed?
- This is why socialism will never work.
- Next time you see them, I bet they tell you that they think you’ve got shit taste. In fact, now they probably hate you.
- since i transfered everything to a external hd, i’ve had several people copy all 200 gigs to their own drives. i never felt the slightest twinge of guilt — these people are friends, and we’ve always shared music. guy’s just a wee bit selfish, methinks.
Media Guardian has a piece today about Q’s i-Pod influenced relaunch (reg rqd).
Their cover feature this month is 1010 tunes you must own - as chosen by a collection of various artists and celebs etc.
This is a great idea for a feature: and it was even better when Word did exactly the same about four months ago.
A month or so ago, my mate Steve (he of the excellent book about Ibiza) lent me a preview copy of the Bees’ new album Free The Bees. He was raving about it after taking it on holiday. Well, I took it, and ripped it…but never really listened to it.
I didn’t really like The Bees first album. It was perfectly pleasant breezy summer stuff - just rather unmemorable, so I didn’t fell the urge: and, at the time Steve loaned it to me, I had a mountain of CDs to listen to.
Well spurred on by a recommendation in Word this month from Lauren Laverne (she of Xfm and previously Kenickie): I listened to it, properly. And it is fabulous retro stuff. They sound like a completely different band from the first album. It’s retro in a whole Beatles-meets-early-Led-Zep kind of way. They just about tread the line between the slavish dad-rock of Ocean Colour Scene and being flagrant Coral copyists. Go on. You know you want it.
The other two recommendations from Word this month are Homesongs by Adem and Please Describe Yourself by Dogs Die in Hot Cars. Both have been ordered.
DDIHC in particular have ‘Next Big Thing‘ written all over them. They seem set to be to Franz Ferdinand what the Zutons have become to The Coral: and, of course, when I had a chance to see them at Glastonbury, I was elsewhere, probably wolfing down another beanburger somewhere….
Observer Music Magazine this weekend has a list of the top 100 British albums. It’s a great issue, and they’ve put the list together by asking dozens of musical luminaries, and you should buy the paper on Sunday. However, I’ve just seen it (one of the perks of the job), and Solid Air isn’t in the list; but Nick Drake seems to be all over it. It’s Nickrophilia gone mad. Where’s my green fountain pen? OK, ignore that. My mistake. Solid Air makes it in at 46. I am a happy man. And the issue is excellent. The celebrity top 10s are worth it on their own. Can agree with Dizzee Rascal being included, though….in anything, ever..
From both Word and Uncut this month. As well as all the usual verbal goodies, Word has dived into the world of covermount CDs with ‘Word of Mouth’ a collection of excellent recent stuff (better even than Uncut’s June CD, which was pretty good).
Uncut is also surprisingly (and unusually) readable. Not too much of a fan of their CD, but there’s an enormous interview with Paul McCartney that looks interesting at first skim.
The end result of both of them is that I now have a list of 20 cds on this month’s ‘possible’ list. That’s too many . I’ll be going through a rigorous selection meeting with myself later this week.
Gordon Burn writes a slightly rambling piece in the Friday Review, on the problem with nostalgia.
In which he admits to continuously buying new music, but only actually listening to his old favourites. Technology, however, has changed this
“I didn’t stop buying new records; I just stopped listening to them. If it came down to a choice between Boards of Canada and Dylan, or the Be Good Tanyas and Joni Mitchell, Dylan and Joni (and Neil Young and the Beach Boys and Keith Jarrett) would always win out.
At a stroke, though, Apple iTunes, the jukebox software that allows you to build a selection of tunes for your iPod, has changed all that.The random shuffle option short-circuits the tendency to listen only to what you already know. In this way I suddenly discovered the Magnetic Fields’s 69 Love Songs after owning the three-album box set for years. Also Bonnie “Prince” Billy. The Smiths (!). Smog. Yo La Tengo. Ms Dynamite. Four Tet. Jim O’Rourke. Each one a reminder that the past is not dead, as William Faulkner once put it; it is not even past.”
Whether or not he’s typical is a matter for debate - but he’s describing something quite significant that’s currently happening to us. CDs changed the way we bought music: we all went out and bought back catalogue etc. But the digital music ‘revolution’ seems to be changing the way we actually listen to it, which is culturally something much more profound.
Commercially, as well, it could be fantastic news for the music industry when the scares over downloading calm down.
Look at the evidence
- there is a generation of men and women who grew up loving pop/rock/dance etc and don’t want to give up the habit
- for a long time they have had the cash to buy whatever CD they want, but they have lacked the time to find out what’s new, or the inclination to play it instead of listening to an old fave.
- now we have Amazon recommendations etc to make trying new things a much safer process
- we also have all sorts of software and hardware to serve up music to you without you having to make any effort..
What’s not to like?
…from Uncut Magazine’s cover mount CD this month. They’ve gone back to the formula of ‘the best of this month’s music’. Well not quite this months’: but it’s all good recent stuff: Franz Ferdinand, Waterboys, Laura Veirs, the Shins etc etc. There’s even a track from Todd Rundgrenn which makes me very glad I didn’t get the album after all.
As for the magazine: well, there’s a great long article on the final days of Pink Floyd, in which I have zero interest.
Surprisingly, they give four stars to Hot Chip’s album. They’re the band I saw supporting (the very excellent) M Craft. I honestly didnt’ think they were serious: probably a bedroom band with a couple of ok songs, sneaked onto the bill because they knew the organiser. Well, it turns out they do record in a bedroom. But they are serious. And Uncut likes them. Might be worth trying. Just don’t ask me for your money back.
According to Press Gazette, the staff of the Face are launching a ‘last-ditch bid’ to try and convince owners Emap that the title has a future.
Emap is looking for either ‘a buyer or a radical new strategy by April’. The staff have launched a ‘save the Face campaign’
I say it’s time they cut their losses and moved on.
Growing up in Liverpool in the late 70s and 80s the Face was a brilliant window on a glamorous post-punk world that seemed a million miles away. In the mid-90s it boomed again along with dance culture and then Britpop. Three times it was at the heart of explosions in British youth culture.
But now, it’s floundering. The Face’s role in our lives has been purloined by everyone from national newspapers (employing the journalists who used to write for it) to Popbitch and Heat. And in a world of such rapid celebrity churn, a title like the Face can’t hold on to its heros for very long: The gap between the front cover of The Face and a photo shoot in OK! is weeks, not years.
It probably has a niche, slightly ahead of Dazed and Confused and Sleaze Nation.
But, that’s not really what it’s there for: It’s like saying, Liverpool would be happy at the top of the First Division.
Overall I doubt it will ever have the same ‘must read’ status it did with 16 - 25 year olds when I was that age; or during the mid 90s. And the real challenge should be to create something that has that, rather than endlessly trying to resuscitate a faded hero.
Better it should die gracefully than spend an eternity trying to regain its lost glory.
- Dylan Jones on how (and why) to save it
- Will Jason Donovan step in?
UPDATE: Looks like Emap took my advice
