11 August 2010
Asda’s summer stilton might be the pinnacle of cheese-with-stuff-in wrongness. It’s white stilton with – can I remember this? can I ever forget it? – white chocolate, vanilla, orange peel, and peach. I needed to try it.
And while I was there, I noticed that Asda also sold something billed as the Ultimate Chocolate Cheese – Wensleydale with Belgian milk chocolate liberally scattered through it. So I sorta, umm, ended up buying that too. more »
marna in FT /Pumpkin Publog • 6 Comments
#624, 11th March 1989
As a pop star, Jason Donovan had two big problems. The first was his singing, which we’ll get to, but the second was that Stock Aitken And Waterman didn’t seem to have much idea what to do with him. Kylie couldn’t sing terribly well either, but she immediately turned out to be a missing piece in the PWL puzzle: a girl who could be ordinary without being boring. It helped that she’d had a few years experience as an actress doing exactly that, too. more »
Tom in Popular • 56 Comments
#389, 2nd June 1976
I was aware of this song long before I heard it – as a young boy it was quoted at me by my Dad should I ever object to tidying my room. Since my room was rarely tidy, I became very familiar with the central notion of “No Charge”. Like my Dad, I can find immense amusement and pleasure in this style of song – talking country with a sentimental edge – but this is far from a great example.
You might think, at first, that the style stands or falls on the strength of its concepts: not so. more »
Tom • FT/Popular •
274 Comments
Introduction
It was about 2 in the morning and I was trying to get a handle on Alexander the Great. I had a final exam coming up and I’d missed half the syllabus – and something else was missing; a way into the man’s head. Alexander had single-handedly destroyed the world’s largest Empire and put an even larger one in its place, had conquered places hardly known to exist, had convinced himself he was the son of a God, had done most of this before he hit 30. That stuff was easy to understand though: what was harder was working out how he’d managed to keep the loyalty of his army, ordinary Greek farmer-soldiers who’d been on the march, away from home and family, for ten years. What was eluding me was the intuitive grasp of how a leader could do that, a fix on the mix of eloquence, megalomania and neediness Alexander must have had.
You won’t believe me, you’ll think it’s strange, but I played “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” that night and I had my answers. more »
Tom • Uncategorized •
8 Comments
THE GREEK ALPHABET OF PISS-POOR POP
I notice elsewhere, in my absence, some young scamp over on NYLPM has started a concept piece, some say think piece entitled the Alphabet Of Pop. Now no-one knows more than myself the beauty of lists, as my Week Of Wank and Breakfast Of Banality proves. Its cheap easy journalism and also gives one a built in deadline which battles stronger than the average slagging of Pavement with the Bombay Sapphire. So I have decided to counter such nonsense more »
Tanya Headon • I Hate Music •
No Comments
Introduction, by Alex Thomson
In many ways Adorno exemplifies the image problem faced by critical theory today. Adorno is not a sexy figure. He comes over in his writing as severe, curmudgeonly and patrician. His prose is deliberately and unrepentantly dense and complex. His philosophical and cultural reference points are out of tune with contemporary fashions.
Nowhere has Adorno’s reputation taken such a beating as in the field of popular culture. In the 1970s a generation of tight-trousered academic pioneers in the uncharted waters of cultural studies took their turns to ridicule Adorno for his supposed pessimism and elitism. Later, Adorno played the fall-guy in the postmodernism wars of the 1980s and 1990s. more »
byebyepride • Uncategorized •
9 Comments
The Pokemon Phenomenon
This piece was going to be an unabashed paean to Pokemania, explaining what a cracking game it was and how the mass tweener hysteria which greets every fresh Pokegame, cardset, pillow-case, or doily was a good thing inasmuch as ten-year-olds are natural obsessives and it wasn’t like they were wasting their time on trash like pop music or something. And yeah, I do think Pokemon on the Game Boy encourages a certain amount of co-operation and strategic thinking and (really really basic) problem-solving and – massive stretch – respect for the environment. But the problem is this respect is won by obliterating the real environment from your mind entirely, because Pokemon also encourages you to spend a beautiful Mediterranean evening hunched over a transparent box, blithely ignoring the play of light on water in favour of the play of Geodude’s Mega Punch on Zubat’s ugly fanged face. more »
Tom • FT •
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9 August 2010
#623, 25th February 1989
The facts: “Belfast Child” is a song written by Jim Kerr in grief and anger after the atrocity of the 1987 Enniskillen bombing, built on a traditional Irish folk tune. “I’m not saying I have any pearls of wisdom,” he’s quoted on Wikipedia as saying, “But I have a few questions to ask.”
Noble intentions rarely translate into effective outcomes. There are an awful lot of cynical and rude things one could say about “Belfast Child”. They might involve words like “stupefying”, “leaden”, and “is that the time”. Or indeed, “desperate”, “wannabe” and “Bono”. more »
Tom in Popular • 120 Comments
8 August 2010
Sex and drugs and rock and roll
Is all my brain and body need
Sex and drugs and rock and roll
Are very good indeed
(Ian Dury and the Blockheads)
versus
You’ve got to fight for what you want
For all that you believe
It’s right to fight for what we want
To live the way we please
As long as we have done our best
Then no one can do more
And life and love and happiness
Are well worth fighting for
(themetune to The Flashing Blade)
(I googled about a bit, without success, to see if this was a well-known spot: in the movie, the fellow playing chaz jankel says “you stole that from somewhere!” to the fellow playing gollum dury, with a big grin… )
Lightning review of film: the visual direction is so sophisticatedly smart and witty — full of jokes about the relationship of punk design to pop art, barney bubbles to peter blake, the videos jankel’s sister annabel would shortly direct — that it’s a bit of a let-down the script is so VERY much a classic and conventional biopic, in which BIG TRAUMATIC EVENTS from childhood SHAPE EVERYTHING, from songs on out…
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • 9 Comments
6 August 2010
Since January I’ve been doing a column in the Guardian every fortnight. These are written for a slightly different audience than my loveable pop-crazy readers here, and it’s also the first time I’ve written regularly for print (web to print is a much bigger shift than unedited to edited, by the way). Even so I thought it might be nice for FT readers who like my stuff to get access to all of them – and frankly it’s useful for me having links in one place too.
The remit of the column is that I’m meant to be jumping off from something that’s happening now – sometimes this is more central to the piece than others.
1. Cheap music and the ‘event single’ (Singles overtake album sales)
2. Indie rock and indirectness. (Spoon’s Transference)
3. The randomness of virality (OK Go griping at their label).
4. What critics get wrong and why (Fall Out Boy split)
5. What does ‘new music’ mean anyway? (6 Music brouhaha)
6. Three types of revivalism (Alphabeat and Goldfrapp LPs)
7. Fans as industry stakeholders (UK Music report on UK industry)
8. Why we want politicians to suck at pop (UK election campaign)
9. Global pop v world music (The Ayobaness! compilation)
10. Pop as a coalition (UK election aftermath)
11. The car-crash that is the UK’s Eurovision strategy (er, Eurovision)
12. Different kinds of populism. (Dizzee’s football single.)
13. Summer jams and the longing for ubiquity. (Katy Perry’s “California Gurls”)
14. Lo-fi as a post-industry survival strategy. (Wavves, Sleigh Bells)
15. The aesthetics of glut (Wiley’s 200 track giveaway)
16. Grown-up-ness in pop (Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs)
Tom in FT • 4 Comments
5 August 2010
#622, 28th January 1989
Reaction amongst friends at the time was a sort of bemused approval: it was a Good Thing for this kind of record to get to number one, but nobody really seemed to love it, and the Pitney/Almond team up was faintly baffling. Of course, that was the odd-couple appeal of it: a gentleman from some ancient past allied to a leathered perv from a more recent one. And even though I remembered “Tainted Love”, in the bright world of Kylie and Jason both pasts seemed equally lost, both sides of this revenant alliance surprising. more »
Tom in Popular • 77 Comments
4 August 2010
It’s the question that’s on everyone’s lips: what can the Bank of England tell us about women in music criticism? more »
katstevens in FT • 10 Comments
2 August 2010
In part 1 of this series looking at artist metrics on Last.FM, I talked about PPL (Plays Per Listener) and also the relative popularity of each act’s top track.
In this part we dig a little bit deeper into an artist’s catalogue, with two more metrics based on their list of top tracks (which, remember, are the tracks with most listeners over the last six months, not over the whole of LFM’s history). I’m calling these metrics – rather unimaginatively – head and body. “Head” is the number of listeners to the tenth most popular track expressed as a percentage of the number of listeners to the first. “Body” is the number of listeners to the fiftieth most popular track expressed as a percentage of the number of listeners to the tenth.
Both of these are based on the same principle – ratios of popular and less popular songs in an artist’s catalogue – but they turn out to measure quite different things. Head measures the extent to which an act is a several-hit wonder. A high head means that your top track isn’t that much more popular than your tenth, which usually means you’ve racked up either a bunch of successful singles or have at least one album that people are keen to listen to in toto. A low head means that you have a few, or maybe just one track which people are particularly keen on but that interest doesn’t extend very far – it suggests a big chunk of casual listeners in your audience. more »
Tom in FT /Proven By Science • 5 Comments
30 July 2010
Some characters thump awake, panting, in a snarl of sweaty sheets. Some characters open their eyes with a snap, hold the pose for a full two camera seconds, sigh. Depends what it’s been – lurid wish-fulfilment, vicious tragedy, traumatic flashback. A shortcut to backstory, a cheap bit of misdirection. Rarely surreal, no abrupt shifts of scene or familiar places in illogical shapes. High emotion. The reason dreams in films so often don’t convince isn’t that they’re unrealistic. It’s that they aren’t unrealistic enough.
No surprise, really. This is the economy of fiction, and what exists must work in service to the plot or it’s out on its ear. But, still, all these characters on all these screens who seem to spend every night staring at a slideshow of memory – after a while you start to wonder if the screenwriters have actual dreams at all.
So what’s great about Inception is that there aren’t any real dreams in it. more »
cis in Do You See /FT • 7 Comments
29 July 2010
#621, 7th January 1989, video
Stock Aitken and Waterman’s skills were based on simplicity: get a feeling, nail it. Their songs are unapologetically direct, with very little ‘side’ or ambiguity. The acts they worked with were similarly well-defined – the square but adorable one (Rick), the sassy ones (Mel & Kim), the confident everygirls (Sonia, Reynolds Girls), and then of course there was Kylie, sunny and optimistic whatever disappointment love threw at her. So “Especially For You” is Kylie’s happy ending, based very much on her Neighbours’ character’s happy ending. more »
Tom in Popular • 40 Comments
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