Sprezzatura

god save riffs and jams, in all the different varieties!  It's that sentence that has made everyone mad since Buddy and Ritchie and the other bloke passed on and Elvis joined the army: rock is dead. At the risk of completely embarrassing myself I think it's true this time. Genres only really get five or six decades to be truly Relevant before they become heritage concerns to be maintained and not innovated within. The blues went from the delta c. 1900 to Chicago clubs in the Fifties before it entered its preservation era in the 60s. "How can you say that when people like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix considered themselves bluesmen?" A of all, you cannot ask artists where they would place themselves critically, because assuming they don't get it wildly wrong like Clapton or Hendrix they will all uniformly say "A bit of everything, really. We just make music , man." Even I, normally the exact kind of nerd you can count on to delineate things properly, fall...

I really don't wanna write about 100gecs, man. I don't even want to listen to them, let alone listen to them enough times to form a a cogent opinion. It was one of those things where you all went mad one summer and as a result I though it would be best to just avoid the whole album. Unfortunately, there's not anything remotely as interesting that happened that year, our last year of freedom, our last year of normal. Everything I look at on year-end best ofs, as I do when an album to write about isn't immediately forthcoming, is part of a different narrative, as I suppose you'd expect at the end of the decade.  really not relevant this week so im getting it in well early, but a bit is a bit, folks fka Twigs came up in the same wave as the James-Blake-y SZA-y "PBR&B" phenomenon I touched on in 2011 and 2012, even though she really doesn't like the term. Angel Olson, like St. Vincent, came up backin others, like My Morning Jacket, before really comin...

Trigger warnings, lads. If you don't wanna hear about blokes being cunts, look away now. 2016 was " Rock's not dead, it belongs to rap now ". 2017 was " Rock's not dead, it's the perfect reaction to [Brexit/Drumpf] now ". 2018 is "Rock's not dead, it belongs to women now." Towards the back half of the decade, lots of female artists and female-fronted bands came to the fore in a way they hadn't really in previous decades of rock and indie music. This isn't to say there weren't any women in bands before, but they were either well spread out or ghettoised into 'riot grrrl' or ' Lilith Fair shite'. 2018-ish is when you could confidently say that the biggest indie rock acts about - St. Vincent, Mitski, Phoebe Bridgers, Haim, and so on - were pretty much all women. How'd that happen, and why should you be arsed? This is, weirdly enough, kind of an outgrowth of emo, and it is thus instructive to read " Wh...

The arc from the first half of the decade is done. Things got minimal, and then people got sick of things being minimal. So now what? It seems to me we should return to the idea of the spectre of the past haunting the present. It happened with Marxism following the fall of the Soviet Union, it happened with rave culture once the feds started to crack down on illegal clubs and the drugs dried up, and it's still happening with "rock music" now.  "Rock is dead" is a cliche that's pretty much as old as rock itself - people were calling it over as early as 1959 when Buddy Holly died, Elvis joined the army, and Jerry Lee Lewis nonced his cousin - but if you look at the past few years you'd assume rock has less cultural cache than ever. The only famous rock bands are, like, Coldplay and Maroon 5? Maybe you class Imagine Dragons as rock, maybe you class Radiohead as popular, but that's really stretching things. The glory days of the late 60s, Hendrix, the Be...

tl;dr: In Colour  is a 6 or 7/10, South London Is Dead, Long Live South London. How did Skrillex happen?   It's all very simple, really. You just have to start in Jamaica in the 1950s, as you do with most things.  "Must you explain ALL music the way Grandpa Simpson explains buying a new heel for his shoe?" Yes. Yes I must. See, they had been getting this music imported from America called "jump blues". It sounds kinda like this . There's a strong shuffle beat and a horn section, among other things. It wasn't the sadder rawer kind of blues from the country - your Robert Johnsons and so on - this was blues made for dancing and general post-war jollity. However, you can only import so many 45's before the US vendors just plain run out of new songs. So the Jamaicans decided to make some jump blues themselves. They REALLY emphasised that shuffle beat that was already present but subtler in the American stuff and this emphasis would become the basis for mo...