OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

YouTube otm

jk don't worry be happy now

*whistles a sad tune*

y'know i was working a show that bobby mcferrin headlined last year and at the end a couple of ushers wouldn't stop yelling "don't worry be happy!" during the encore applause and i thought at first they were making fun of him but as it happened they were just telling him to sing it. he completely ignored them.

So you could go and watch Bobby McFerrin live and not even get to see 'Don't Worry, Be Happy'? What kind of next level bullshit is that?

i'm assuming you're being facetious but on the off chance you're not: mcferrin has had a 25 year career since 'don't worry be happy' that includes about twenty albums and multiple grammy wins. don't worry will likely be the first line of his obit but it's not at all indicative of the range, scope and excellence of his work or of his pretty spectacular live performance

Bollocks to that

songs the kids did at the school talent show last night:

"wiccan lullaby" (!!!)

"ode to joy" (zzzzz...)

"falling slowly"

"shady grove" (bluegrass fever)

"letters i never sent"

"i am not a robot"

"up above my head" (trad gospel)

"i like to moo" (think this might have been an original...)

"gentle arms of eden" (commie folk)

"fur elise" (zzzz...)

"turning tables"

"the lion sleeps tonight" (trad zulu)

"maxwell's silver hammer"(trad paul)

"pompeii" (i dug this. never heard it. death rock.)

"royals"

"mountain sound"

"say something"

"drive by" (trad train)

"wagon wheel" (old crow song. the girl who sang it can really sing!)

"sing together" (more train!)

and there was more. it was endless. it was like 3 & a half hours of sitting in the grange hall. i took multiple smoke breaks.

sounds awesome

don't worry, will likely

For the record, I was being facetious. Being a fan of Wire, The Fall and suchlike, I'm all about bands not 'playing the hits' if they so wish. (Although I can't say I know much about Bobby M.)

Post of magazine covers was a direct response to a poster saying that pop stars are not on magazine covers fwiw.

And my original point was not that pop music is absolutely inescapable for everyone as much as that it still seems relatively prevalent in the environment in a similar way as it used to be; I was also saying, just as much, that pop music was escapable before the Internet. I actually thought ums made some fair points in response to this btw (particularly to do with the limits on purchasing options for people in smaller markets pre-Internet) so thanks to him.

https://metro.co.uk/2014/04/13/nine-things-the-kids-of-today-will-never-understand-about-britpop-4696887/

oh yeah, i read that article a couple of weeks ago. half those things have nothing to do with Britpop. also - do kids these days not try and sneak into drinking establishments?

vs
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/apr/27/britpop-and-me-looking-back-not-in-anger-eva-wiseman

Britpop was our moon landing, except janglier. It was our Summer of Love, our Nelson Mandela's presidential years, our fall of the wall. It was the awkward suburban girl's Wonderful World of Colour. The never-kissed's big bang.

gonna venture that was not written with an entirely straight face

The ATP news feed on my fb posted a link to some Anthony bourdain yells at cloud piece on dance music and all the comments were ppl telling them off, lol. I suspect mischief on ATP's part. Didn't read the piece but seems like a candidate for this thread.

oh yeah I skipped that one too

This kinda makes me want to back in time and not get bored w Britpop after a year or so purely to annoy Taylor Parkes

http://thequietus.com/articles/15092-blur-parklife-anniversary-review

related to earlier discussions: how editor's choices of title skews author's meaning
http://www.pajiba.com/think_pieces/how-saloncom-rewrote-my-headline-and-turned-me-into-an-internet-troll.php

that taylor parkes article is briliant and doesnt belong here

The quest for clicks overrides the intentions of the author. Probably happens all the time.

Those shiny compact discs were seriously expensive in 1994. We’ve since spent a fortune buying them again as downloads.

uhhh you know that you can rip a cd into your computer, right?

lol

what??!

XXXP: Taylor writes his own headlines. It was a fair assumption as most don't but wrong in this case.

that taylor parkes article is briliant and doesnt belong here

I love Taylor Parkes and agree that his article does not belong here, but at the same time his prose style remains so redolent of Melody Maker circa 1995 that it produces a weird sense of discombobulation. Every sentence makes me more nostalgic for Britpop (maybe even the experience of hating Britpop at the time) than most of the other shit I've read about it in these terrible weeks.

is there another thread where we're discussing this article? there's lots there to unpack (and i really like it). his fixation with the obnoxiousness of blur is really useful. did make me want to listen to lots of pulp and bbr and the other also-rans that don't fit in his (or britpop's) narrative.

(of course there's an impt sense in which pulp are hardly an 'also ran' so forgive me) (and then how does this then pivot into B&S idk)

why are there so many articles about Britpop lately?

100-year WWI anniversary. It's all linked

trench warfare = Melody Maker magazine

lord kitchener = jo whiley

the somme = ok computer

Somme less wasteful

Sterling the discussions over on the britpop thread. Cant link from here tho, sorry

Crut its 20 years since parklife came out

20 years since 1st Korn album tlater this year. Just wait til those thinkpieces hit!

had to google Parklife tbh

blur were shit

weren't they

^thinkpiece

mogwai thought so

they knew about middle class private school educated rockers pretending to be working class..

I remember seeing Blur in those days (I think it was in 1992 in Palo Alto, according to Songkick), and damn that was a lame show. They were crazy drunk and spent most of the show trying to push over the PA speakers...

The Taylor Parkes piece is too muddled even though I agree that Britpop's aesthetic complacency was related to a larger political complacency that was rampant during the Blair/Clinton years. Don't really understand British class politics so I can't speak to that aspect of Blur's legacy. They sound stressful.

From my own experiences political complacency in the UK was at it's peak in the period that lay between Blair's election and the war in Iraq. That's my own outlook as I was a student during that time and I was horrified at how few students were interested in current affairs. The number of people attending student fee protests on my campus were negligible, and this is Essex Uni we're talking about, a hotspot for lefty sit-ins during the seventies. Ibiza Trance and UKG were by far the most popular styles of music for students at that time.

I put it here bc I honestly regretted reading it, and it left feeling quite favourable towards Britpop, so

Of course a period of prosperity between the Cold War and 9/11 was going to be more apolitical but if you're going to blame Britpop for epitomising vacuous optimism and complacency then you should also blame dance music and nobody seems to be doing that.