Is the Guardian's music coverage getting good?

I like Alexis Petridis too, I don't think I would disagree with many of the faults pointed out above - but half way readable musical critisism is now so rare since the weeklys gave up that I can forgive some minor sins.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/dec/15/paulmccartney-thebeatles

OK, couldn't find / remember the usual guardian thread, so used this one.

Um, is this a cack handedly written article?

Specifically, this bit:

While it's John Lennon who has retained the reputation for rabble-rousing, "I politicised the Beatles," McCartney insisted. And now he has passed the "megaphone" to a new generation of political artists, he said. People like Bono.

Bono, meanwhile, was honoured in Paris this weekend, at the Peace Summit. "I am an over-awarded, over-rewarded rock star," Bono said after receiving the Man of Peace prize. "You are the people who do the real work."

Somewhere in England, Paul McCartney is squeaking: "Me too!"

Swash Dogs and Diet Coke Heads: the 2008 rolling Guardian zing thread

though i guess we need a new name for it.

soon

Sean Michaels is a worse music writer than his "AIDS-stricken Chippendale" name-a-like wrestler would make.

he's writer for the Montreal-based music blog Said the Gramophone. what have you ever done?

I called it as cack-handedly written.

I don't want his job. Still, though.

What have I done? I wrote a Jesus and Mary Chain article for Record Collector Magazine.

£120. So, yay to me.

Couldn't find a sexism in music thread, didn't want to start a thread just for this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/sep/01/gender-stereotypes-indie-music

Androgyny can even been seen in the common use of falsetto by male singers as a higher register is usually associated with femininity.

yeah... that just happened

Ha, when I saw the revive I knew it was going to be about this. Pointless article.

What do people think of... Rosie Swash?

"Are gender stereotypes still present in indie music? Ask the unidentified girl in this photo, which centers on her breasts and crops off her head!"

Ha, when I saw the revive I knew it was going to be about this. Pointless article.

it was passed on to me by someone

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I'm trying to wean myself off the 'c+p-ing the comment box morons' thing but... the first fucking response

you suggesting Guardian readers are morons?

"Are gender stereotypes still present in indie music? Ask the unidentified girl in this photo, which centers on her breasts and crops off her head!"

― like a musical album. made by a band. (fucking in the streets), Thursday, September 2, 2010 12:10 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark

haw

you suggesting Guardian readers are morons?

Most of those who comment are. And I comment myself...

'The indie professor' is perhaps the least appealing nom de plume I can imagine.

how very true

people who comment are the worst. never reading comments on anything ever again.

we're doing it here though!

but , yes, You are right. HYS is still the worst though.

lol @ using crowd surfing as the benchmark. i've not done it but i've had the fuckers go over me and quite frankly, i'm too busy trying not to be fallen on or kicked in the head to care where my hands go on their body as self defence. I lost the lense to my glasses after being kicked in the face by one of these cunts; the least I can do is punch the person who kicked it out in the cunt/nads.

Crowd surfing is such a red herring here. It's almost like it was inserted into the article to derail any meaningful dismussion.

But I know better than to try to participate in threads like this... ooops.

::removes delurking device::

Yeah, I just couldn't get past the start. Women still mistreated, although not as bad as it used to be? Either way it's not going to be sorted by bad writing.

The whole article on women = picture of boobs thing really pisses me off. No, I don't care if you're writing purportedly feminist things, you've just invalidated everything you have to say. Fuck you.

(Obviously I'm not always against pictures of boobs, just this lazy fucking trend. Seriously, FUCK YOU ALL.)

Yeah, but the person who writes the article != the person who chooses the accompanying image.

And with that image, again, I wonder if it was deliberately chosen to counteract the message of the article. (Wouldn't put it past a subeditor with an axe to grind thinking "this article is poorly written but got published because it's right-on, so ha! I will subvert it with an inappropriate image!" because it's the kind of pedantic nastiness that subeditors excel at.)

That is true. I guess I lump together author/subs/editors as one big 'this is the way this newspaper chooses to present its ethos' thing. The article is rather poorly written and confused by itself, anyway, but that wouldn't be enough to make me mad, more LOL Guardian music coverage.

in fairness images which represent the message "crowd surfing - srs business" are possibly not in abundance

I have a major problem with the idea that crowdsurfing is common at indie gigs. Seeing as that is the type of gig I go to most, and I go to quite a lot, and, um, it maybe happens at 1 in 40 shows. And most of those shows are more punk rock than indie. So what is the author's definition of 'indie'?

I feel like it probably happens at, idk, most Babyshambles gigs or something like that, but I stay as far away from those as I suspect you do

not getting why the pic is deemed inappropriate, the article is in part about why women are anti-crowd surfing and the photo depicts a woman who is anti-crowd surfing

...a faceless woman in a photograph that focuses on her breasts. No, that's not problematic at all with regards to the depiction of women as objects or bodies rather than people.

The whole article on women = picture of boobs thing really pisses me off. No, I don't care if you're writing purportedly feminist things, you've just invalidated everything you have to say. Fuck you.

(Obviously I'm not always against pictures of boobs, just this lazy fucking trend. Seriously, FUCK YOU ALL.)

― emil.y, Thursday, September 2, 2010 4:15 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah, but the person who writes the article != the person who chooses the accompanying image.

And with that image, again, I wonder if it was deliberately chosen to counteract the message of the article. (Wouldn't put it past a subeditor with an axe to grind thinking "this article is poorly written but got published because it's right-on, so ha! I will subvert it with an inappropriate image!" because it's the kind of pedantic nastiness that subeditors excel at.)

― cymose corymb (Karen D. Tregaskin), Thursday, September 2, 2010 4:18 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

That is true. I guess I lump together author/subs/editors as one big 'this is the way this newspaper chooses to present its ethos' thing. The article is rather poorly written and confused by itself, anyway, but that wouldn't be enough to make me mad, more LOL Guardian music coverage.

― emil.y, Thursday, September 2, 2010 4:21 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark

pic is actually "author's own"!!

there are all sorts of layout reasons why the photo might have been cropped at that point. plus, the message is contained on her t-shirt, which covers her breasts. kinda hard to show the t-shirt without showing the (covered) breasts, I would have thought.

xp

My eyes were drawn straight to the chips tbh. Goddamn it don't show me that when I'm hungry.

anagram, then maybe they should have re-thought the entire design, if literally the only way they could show a woman is by fragmenting her personhood.

im not even a feminist and i think it's ridic

ugh I should have headed advice upthread
http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/7528753

Ugh, that comment. Don't see the fuss over the picture myself - it's standard when showing a T-shirt image/slogan to focus/crop like that so your eye is drawn to the T-shirt rather than the face of the wearer, regardless of gender. "Fragmenting her personhood"? Really?

http://www.omgmod.org/wiki/images/e/eb/YA_RLY.jpg

Yeah, really. Obviously there are times when it's fairly unimportant, but juxtaposed with an article that is explicitly attempting to address problematic gender issues completely undermines any point you might be trying to make.

(Should have said 'fairly unimportant to me', rather than 'fairly unimportant'. I don't often get riled - I'm fairly inured to my gender being portrayed badly, but it's the self-contradiction, blatant idiocy and sheer laziness of imagery that really gets to me here.)

She's not faceless; only half of her face is missing.

See, this is one of the biggest problems with imagery like that attached to articles like that - and why I think it's a derrailing tactic. Because we then get bogged down with people pointing fingers at the "feminists" telling them they really don't have a reason to be bothered by these things (while comments like *that* really do show that we have a bit of a point?) It then completely bypasses the point of anything good that might have been accomplished by opening up a debate about these things (becase we're, you know, "oversensitive" - or oversensitised?)

It's all a bit one step forward, two steps back.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/jan/04/adele-success-major-label

xp Mostly crossover stuff that has a bit of traction in the alternative press - Liturgy, Wolves In The Throne Room, Ghost, etc but there are bits and pieces that cater to a wider variety of fans.

idk, i think it's great that a national newspaper has a blog whose last few pieces have been about D'angelo, Adele, David Lee Roth, Taiwanese Chart music, Goldfrapp and Maurizio Pollini.

ahh stuff I like then. Maybe I should read it every day rather than when someone links me to it.

It's funny, I love reading reviews in print mags but I never really read online reviews. I don't even read pitchfork or anything like that.

http://www.brilldream.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/for-record-debunking-myth-of-vinyl.html

Imagine, if you will, a world where the media gets itself all excited about a beer revival. The BBC makes programmes about beer, full of hazily recreated shots of a heavily side-burned young man entering a 70's pub and wistfully buying a pint in a handled glass. The great and the good trip of themselves to comment about how great buying beer is. "You never forget buying your first pint" says one. "There's that silence, then a clink of glass" chimes another "then you get your first sip. It's like magic". The press flies the flag for beer. 'The Beer Revival' screams the Mail headline. "An online poll of 1,700 beer buyers found that 86 per cent of them said it was their favourite ale format. A third of today’s beer fans are aged under 35. 'Beer is back' says another. "The first half of 2013 saw sales of beer increase by over 33%, based on the previous year’s numbers.' Great, you may think to yourself, I like beer. But hang on a minute, I've been buying beer since my late teens and have never stopped, how can it be back if it never went away?

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/nov/27/vinyls-making-a-comeback-dont-believe-the-hype

The other night, outside one of those preposterous city-centre places that is both a grocer and a restaurant, I noticed a remarkable deal on offer in the boxes of produce stacked up outside. A bunch of half a dozen or so carrots, green stalks attached at the top, soil clinging to the orange roots, was on sale for a bargain £2.50. You can stick your £1 for a bag bursting with the things from Morrison’s or Iceland, because those are the carrots I want, oh yes. And given that the stupidly priced bunch of carrots with green tops and soil is cropping up in farmers’ markets and chi-chi grocers all across Britain, then I’m calling it now. Never mind that the vast majority of people are still buying their carrots from supermarkets at a much cheaper price, and that there’s no sign of that ever changing, because I’m willing to say there’s a stupidly priced bunch of carrots comeback!

if you're trying to infer that the second article has plagiarised the first then I don't think you have even a glimmer of a case and if not idk what your point is

no inference at all. just thought it was funny.

I wrote the Guardian vinyl blog. Had no idea about the other piece.

did not know but honestly nothing was inferred just that it seems to be a common argument used with slight variations. No offence intended.

None taken. Just pointing it out.

Also making a comeback:
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/abacus.jpg