The Smu Reviews

Ten, fifteen years ago when I was going through an evangelical digitisation and minimalisation phase I would have disagreed strongly with this piece but in recent years I have found myself falling back in love with physical media all over again.

Like the author I discovered so many delights in my parents record and book collections and as an adult have learned to reapreciate the beauty of putting the needle down at the start of the record and listening until the end – metaphorically and literally.

Where once I had a collection of magazine clippings now I have a pinterest board and he is right, it’s not the same. It’s not the fact it’s printed that makes it special, it’s not even the keeping hold of it – it’s the wearing down of love. The blue tak marks, the creases, the finger prints, the glorious decline of an object that has been important to you.

In truth that period of material abstinence did me a lot of good because I was likely on my way to becoming if not clinically a hoarder then something just a bit too close for comfort. Now I find myself able to be more selective – I own the things I truly love, that mean something to me. The things that I would like someone else to discover by poking around in my collection one day.

What did we do to deserve Pitchfork?

Fantastic article on the history of Pitchfork and the recent music industry in general. Here are a couple of excerpts but please read the whole piece..

..as indie bands watched the industry’s collapse, the envy and contempt they had traditionally felt toward major labels stopped making sense. What was there to envy anymore? Wasn’t it obvious that indie bands, with their devoted networks of fans, critics, and performance venues, had it better? Not only were the major labels soul-sucking money machines, they couldn’t even make you rich! This made early indie’s militancy and paranoia look silly, and the hard lines began to soften.

In the last thirty years, no artistic form has made cultural capital so central to its identity, and no musical genre has better understood how cultural capital works. Disdaining the reserves of actual capital that were available to them through the major labels, indie musicians sought a competitive advantage in acquiring cultural capital instead. As indie’s successes began following one another in increasingly rapid succession, musicians working in other genres began to take notice. Hip-hop is an illustrative foil. As indie bands in the ’90s did everything they could to avoid the appearance of selling out, rappers tried to get as rich as possible. The really successful ones stopped rapping—or at least outsourced the work of writing lyrics—and opened clothing lines and record labels. But for all their corporate success, rappers knew where the real cultural capital lay. When Jay-Z decided, as an obscenely wealthy entertainment mogul, that he wanted finally to leave his drug-dealer persona behind, he got himself seen at a Grizzly Bear concert in Williamsburg. 

Pitchfork has fully absorbed and adopted indie rock’s ideas about the uses of cultural capital, and the results have been disastrous. Indie rock is based on the premise that it’s possible to disdain commercial popularity while continuing to make rock and roll, the last half century’s most popular kind of commercial music. Sustaining this premise has almost always involved suppressing or avoiding certain kinds of knowledge. For indie bands, this meant talking circles around the fact that eventual success was not actually improbable or surprising. For indie rock’s critics, it meant refusing to acknowledge that writing criticism is an exercise in power. 

This is a kind of music, in other words, that’s very good at avoiding uncomfortable conversations. Pitchfork has imitated, inspired, and encouraged indie rock in this respect. It has incorporated a perfect awareness of cultural capital into its basic architecture. A Pitchfork review may ignore history, aesthetics, or the basic technical aspects of tonal music, but it will almost never fail to include a detailed taxonomy of the current hype cycle and media environment. This is a small, petty way of thinking about a large art, and as indie bands have both absorbed and refined the culture’s obsession with who is over- and underhyped, their musical ambitions have been winnowed down to almost nothing at all.

It’s usually a waste of time to close-read rock lyrics; a lot of great rock musicians just aren’t that good with words. What you can do with a rock lyric, though, is note the kinds of phrasing that come to mind when a musician is trying to fill a particular rhythmic space with words. You can see what kind of language comes naturally, and some of the habits and beliefs that the language reveals. This makes it worth pausing, just for a moment, over Animal Collective’s most famous lyric: “I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things.” The ethical lyric to sing would be, “I don’t want to be someone who cares about material things,” but in indie rock today the worst thing would be just to seem like a materialistic person. You can learn a lot about indie rock, its fans, and Pitchfork from the words “mean to seem like.”

I sometimes have the utopian thought that in a better world, pop music criticism simply wouldn’t exist. What justification could there be for separating the criticism of popular music from the criticism of all other kinds? Nobody thinks it’s weird that theNew York Review of Books doesn’t include an insert called the New York Review of Popular Books. One of pop music criticism’s most important functions today is to perpetuate pop music’s favorite myth about itself—that it has no history, that it was born from nothing but drugs and “revolution” sometime in the middle of the 20th century. But the story of The Beatles doesn’t begin with John, Paul, George, and Ringo deplaning at JFK. It begins with Jean-Philippe Rameau’s 1722 Treatise on Harmony, which began to theorize the tonal system that still furnishes the building blocks for almost all pop music. Or, if you like, it goes back to the 16th century, when composers began to explore the idea that a song’s music could be more than just a setting for the lyrical text—that it could actually help to express the words as well. Our very recent predecessors have done many important and wonderful things with their lives, but they did not invent the musical universe all by themselves. The abolition of pop criticism as a separate genre would help pop writers to see the wider world they inhabit.

Little, Brown Book Group announces that the new novel for adults by J.K. Rowling is entitled The Casual Vacancy.  The book will be published worldwide in the English language in hardback, ebook, unabridged audio download and on CD on Thursday 27th September 2012.

The Casual Vacancy

When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock.

Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war.

Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…Pagford is not what it first seems.

And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?

Blackly comic, thought-provoking and constantly surprising, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults.

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA SO EXCITING!

The UK Music Video Awards are voted for by people working in and around the promos industry, so are viewed as an insider’s take on the best music video work of the year. This year saw a widening of the awards to include international winners in every category, alongside a favourite UK winner. Canada, who were profiled in the October issue of CR (read the article here), also picked up the Best Pop Video – International award for Oh Land by White Nights and the Best Art Direction and Design gong for Invisible Light by Scissor Sisters (both shown below).

Great to see Invisible Light getting some love 😀

Read the rest here »

brettanderson:

“I kind of hate most narrative videos to be honest, including my own, I just wanted to capture the energy of the band.”

For better or worse, television requires very little effort on the part of the user. Aside from changing the channel or looking at the onscreen TV guide, television is just “there.”

Connected devices, on the other hand, demand a lot more user effort. Viewers have to make conscious choices about what content they want to watch. This is fine if someone wants to watch a specific movie or TV show, but it can be less satisfying for the channel surfer. There is much less serendipity built into the current generation of connected devices.

As someone who has never had a satalite contract and has not had ‘TV’ for nearly a decade I am fascinated to see where ‘connected TV’ (as the article refers to it) goes over the next 5 years.

Ironically in the last 6 months I have moved back to FreeView and largely away from ‘connected TV’ due to various issues with broadband speeds, contracts and prices. Currently I am using a mi-fi unit – a very exciting piece of technology that I think may well change the face of Wi-Fi – and allthough the speed is fine the data cap is prohibitive.

I hate FreeView though because of everything ‘TV’ that it brings with it – the constant shouty adverts, the osmosis dripfeed of things and people I really don’t care about and the inherent lazy channel surfing that despite my best intentions I still end up doing.

It does sound however that for ‘connected TV’ to succeed it will end up taking on most of the characteristics (and evils) of regular TV – but that will only hold true I suspect of the major services like Hulu and integrated solutions like Google TV. I hope there will still always be those oasis’ of calm like the BBC iPlayer and 4OD out there.

As soon as I can afford to increase my Wi-Fi package I will gleefuly ditch the little black box and in the meantime try my very hardest to Switch Off My Television Set and Go Do Something Less Boring Instead..

So this is a pre-Fame demo that I’ve become obsessed with recently. I know it’s sort of awful but somehow I just Can’t Stop Listening to it. I like to think of it as the best thing that Steps never recorded. 

A. MAZING.

melancholy and infite bowie

David Bowie – Sunday
David Bowie – 5:15 The Angels Have Gone
David Bowie – Slip Away
David Bowie – The Loneliest Guy
David Bowie – Try Some, Buy Some
David Bowie – She’ll Drive The Big Car
David Bowie – If I’m Dreaming My Life
David Bowie – Something In The Air
David Bowie – Everyone Says ‘Hi’
David Bowie – Thursday’s Child
David Bowie – Strangers When We Meet
David Bowie – Survive
David Bowie – Bring Me The Disco King
David Bowie – Seven
David Bowie – Days
David Bowie – What’s Really Happening?
David Bowie – Brilliant Adventure
David Bowie – The Dreamers
David Bowie – Outside
David Bowie – Thru’ These Architects Eyes
David Bowie – New Angels Of Promise
David Bowie – Abdulmajid
David Bowie – Pallas Athena
David Bowie – A New Career In A New Town
David Bowie – No Control
David Bowie – You’ve Been Around
David Bowie – Nite Flights
David Bowie – The Motel
David Bowie – I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday

Marina And The Diamonds – I Am Not a Robot
Polly Scattergood – Other Too Endless
Kate Bush – How To Be Invisible
Marina And The Diamonds – Seventeen
Little Boots – Remedy
Lady Gaga – Dance In The Dark
Roisin Murphy – Movie Star
Florence + The Machine – Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)
Bat For Lashes – Daniel
Amanda Palmer – The Point Of It All
Polly Scattergood – Bunny Club
Adam Lambert – Soaked
Amanda Palmer – What’s The Use Of Wondrin
Bat For Lashes – What’s A Girl To Do?
The Killers – Spaceman
Pet Shop Boys – My girl
M.I.A. – Paper Planes
Madonna – Revolver – feat. Lil Wayne
Katy Perry – I Kissed A Girl (Jason Nevins Funkrokr Extended Mix)
Dragonette – Fixin To Thrill
Eva Simons – Silly Boy
Lady Gaga – Telephone
Shakira – She Wolf
MIKA – Relax, Take It Easy
Lady Gaga – Teeth
Röyksopp – The Girl And The Robot
Lady Gaga – So Happy I Could Die
Dragonette – Jesus Doesn’t Love Me
Röyksopp – Tricky Tricky
Air – Alpha Beta Gaga (Edit 91)