Is the Guardian's music coverage getting good?

iirc...

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/7/2010/09/340x_pastebig.jpg

(the answer was yes)

has anyone read her book that she mentioned?

However, even in 2006, when Pitchfork reviewed my book on the culture of indie music, the writer actually talked about my cleavage!

matos said it was the most intelligent book ever written on music

but what did he think of the cleavage?

he said it was one of the smartest in years, to be accurate

I read the book a little after my college years. It was one of my ethnomusicology professor's favorite book. For an anthropology book it was an accessible read. Which is a hard feat concerning the academic field. After reading it I got some sense of indie culture (I guess...) but it has opened my mind to listening to it more often. However, I don't remember seeing boobies.

no one argues about ownership in hip-hop and nobody worries about who wrote the music to decide if you are "jazz" or not

Either I'm missing her point here or this is bullshit.

it's just bullshit

okay, the whole thing is bullshit on lots of levels. first the breaking of things into "teams" is achingly foolish, and worse, it's simplistic and doesn't speak honestly to how most fans conceptualize the music. rather than there being some dedicated group of people who unthinkingly reduce the genre to any music that happens to exist on an independent label, and another opposing group countering that it's all about "indie attitude," these tend to be complementary and less reductive understandings. same goes for the hostility to some presumed mainstream, which exists primarily as a political/aesthetic justification for the former two. and most of us, i think, can see that indie aesthetics (as codified in the pop genre she smirkingly reduces to "stylish four-piece beat combos with skinny guys and skinny girls in skinny jeans...") arose out of that conceptual background, but eventually eventually began to separate themselves from it.

so much half-baked, snarky nonsense in that quote. "However, no one seems to worry about the ownership of artists' publishing companies or booking agencies. This tells you independent ownership is more about perception of autonomy rather than actual autonomy." bullshit. it only tells us that the writer is proud of her own perspicacity and has no idea how important book your own fucking life has been to the development of indie music.

I get the impression that it's written for its audience even more than the rest of the paper's bloggy stuff - if you hold your nose and jump into the c*mment s*ction it's largely a load of yahoos writing "lol indie sux and is gay" over and over, and the skinny jeans chestnuts she drops in seem to be as much in pre-emptive defence as anything, not that that makes it any more exciting to wade through.

There's a kernel of truth in the "perception of autonomy rather than actual autonomy" thing, insofar as you have to be fairly deep in the DIY punk rabbithole to find ppl talking about blacklisting or otherwise disliking booking agents, but more or less everyone has an idea of a shitty label - it's more of a surface level part of a band's identity. But yeah your last sentence is otm

i thought you was "great British wagemann" and lold

scary thought

For example, no one argues about ownership in hip-hop

i lol'd

ha ha ha. I do like the book, though, esp. the way she breaks down the way a concert audience's positions from the stage make up specific zones.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/interactive/2011/jun/11/history-modern-music-timeline

I've already spotted one mistake in it, but I think that particular article was written by an ILX0r!

the r&b and hip-hop section seems a bit light on R&B

the indie section sort of peters out about 1992 which seems accurate

spiral scratch ep a stunning omission from indie

wow there are as many as four genres now?

lol surprise I have several issues with the hardcore punk article (written by our own Stevie) as well...

(although that's just a matter of opinion, not a factual error like the other one)

this one? http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jun/14/ian-makaye-bad-brains-hardcore

don't have any issues w/ anything in the main text, guessing he didn't write the section headline

Ah, well if that's the case then that was what I was mainly objecting to, and how that colours the rest of the article.

Like if it was Ian MacKaye and Bad Brains popularise hardcore then fine (but I'm picking nits).

xpost Spiral Scratch is mentioned in Morley's piece about the Lesser Free Trade Hall gig.

very much a potted history - ie what do our writers know about - than a definitive one. just another way for the site to get more visitors/to sell more papers through a not exactly essential supplement.

Yep, a potted history. But what do people expect in a series of 24-page supplements?

In the interests of honesty, I ought to confess to those who don't know that I edited the indie one and the rock one.

Pretty sure the ILM hip-hop poll is a more useful resource/archive for any possible purpose than the Guardian hip-hop timeline.

A+ interface though!

Just fyi then,

Recorded during the Falklands war in May, flexidiscs of How Does it Feel to Be the Mother of 1,000 Dead? were smuggled, guerrilla-style, into random albums by distributors Rough Trade. It sailed out under its own steam in November, replacing Robert Wyatt's Falklands-themed Shipbuilding at the top of the independent chart.

The flexi that was smuggled into random albums was Sheep Farming In The Falklands, and it was recorded the year after the Falklands war.

Morley writing about the Free Trade Hall Gig? Woah! I was wondering when he'd break his silence about that gig. So many unanswered questions about whether Mick Hucknall was standing stage left or stage right, and whether Peter Hook tried to smuggle three cans of Top Brass bitter into the gig in a Tesco carrier bag or not.

xp. You're half-right and I was half-wrong. Sheep Farming, not How Does It Feel, was indeed the flexi but it was recorded and first released during the war - it was only the official seven-inch that appeared a year later.

It's true, "Sheep Farming" was a 'comedy' song, until they decided that it needed a more serious response once people started dying...

I was wondering when he'd break his silence about that gig

haha

it was only the official seven-inch that appeared a year later.

Haha shit you're right, I had a feeling as soon as I submitted that I was myself going to be wrong in some way, it's the pedant's curse.

Always tricky to pinpoint the first truly indie release. I get the argument for making it "So It Goes" - but as I recall, Stiff weren't absolutely totally unquestionably 100% independent, although memory fails as to in what respect. So I've always benchmarked Spiral Scratch instead: a fully homegrown operation, giving a platform to a new band (rather than a former member of a signed band). Or then again, you could start with The Count Bishops' Speedball EP on Chiswick, at the back end of 75...

Stiff's first bunch of singles were distributed by United Artists.

Then they 'joined' Island records, sort of.

Desperate Bicycles? Or is that way too late?

Ah, I had Island in the back of my mind. Yeah, Desperate Bicycles were, ooh, about three or four months after Spiral Scratch - and SS did the whole "breakdown of production costs on the sleeve" thing, which kinda marked it out ideologically.

I think the Speedball e.p. is also what I would say.

Then again, there's always been 'independant' records, I'd even consider "Immediate" to be in the running...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/series/a-history-of-dance-music?page=3 dance music bit is pretty good.
thought the 90s section of the Indie one was baffling.

apart from cringey uk bits

It's mostly UK though.

Actually, seems like recent UK dance music (dubstep and onwards) gets an undue amount of prominence, it's a bit 'history as rewritten by the (current) victors'. Including Rusko and Blackout Crew is very odd when all that the entirety of Europe gets is a nod towards Daft Punk and Villalobos.

it's not possible to condense things into these sort of lists, and it's just a newspaper covering music in the deficient way that newspapers do, is what i have to repeat to myself if i bother to start getting annoyed.

I really like the layout and the idea and the articles

but it's just never going to be close to finished is it?

if it was a standalone website with a staff like amg or something it could probably be amazing but its weird to tack it on to the guardian

actually a standalone website for the dance section entirely consisting of youtubes of seminal tracks would keep me occupied for months

It's something to sell papers: seven supplements in seven days. The problem is that these things can never be marketed as what they are: "Seven supplements containing some things we think are interesting and will entertain you for the duration of your commute" because that's not a strong enough sell, so a stronger form of words is employed. With the result that they are then criticised for not being definitive, when they never could be within their constraints. It's true of all supplements published by all publications on all subjects, really.

That Petridis article linked at the top is such a treasure trove.

As the spell of the 60s wore off, everyone realised they had made a terrible mistake. They didn't actually want to live in communes and share mung beans with their neighbours. Instead they headed back to the safety of their bedsits with only Joni Mitchell or James Taylor for company.

Eek. Or to bring it up closer to the present day:

Britpop died the night England were knocked out of Euro '96

! Or:

I have absolutely no idea what the next Chemical Brothers album is going to sound like.

In 2001?? I did!

xpost completely otm. even the process of trying to be definitive irritates me, or (and this is awful in guardian music stuff) the comments section reserved for "what we forgot" where the first 30 are like "seems you have criminally forgotten hercules and love affair" or "i believe you've omitted booka shade, not exactly comprehensive is it???"

A while ago, every "punk" retrospective seemed to start with the NY scene, added the london scene, and then for some reason ended with James Chance / jazz.

As if someone was desperately trying to make a case for the Wag club being the natural successor to the Pistols and the 100 club..