Sprezzatura

There's been this big argument over "whiteness" in indie for years now - the Radiohead article I wrote about a few months back is only the latest in a long line of hand-wringing thinkpieces. Witness " The Unbearable Whiteness Of Indie ", a car crash of an article where key gripes include a film set in Scotland (96% White) not casting an Aboriginal Australian actress in the lead role and the writers of " I'm At The Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell " being unfairly dismissed as 'joke rap'. Or perhaps " A Paler Shade Of White " is more your speed, where the writer devotes a big chunk of time to discussing his own singing in his own band, which he could never make "black" enough to work; laments that Arcade Fire don't use polyrhythms or borrow from African or Caribbean music enough; and suggests modern bands should be more reverent to black contributions to music, like Led Zeppelin were, who made it a mission to sca...

"I got a mob like A$AP Rocky. I set trends, dem man copy." - Stormzy, " Shut Up " Here's the album - it's a mixtape, so it's not on Spotify or owt. There's really only one album from this year you can talk about as setting the tone for rap in the rest of the 2010s. It was hazy, drugged-out, defiantly in-its-feelings, and more than a little bit inspired by the chopped-and-screwed hip hop that had been coming out of Houston at a steady pace for near enough twenty years (at the time, it's nearly thirty now). That album is, of course, Drake's Take Care . Nine years on, it may be difficult to understand just how mad Take Care  was at the time. Drake had actually landed three rap chart number ones beforehand - admittedly one was a collab with 2010 Lil Wayne, 2010 Eminem, and 2010 Kanye West, which is basically cheating, you may as well say "Oriol Romeu won the 2011 Liga Santander, ignoring the fact that Iniesta, Xavi, and Messi were also on t...