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...

When I was a kid we would drive from north Mitcham to Bellenden Road in Peckham, near my mum's old house, to buy Jamaican patties, hard dough bread, and guava jelly. There was a mural at Goose Green in East Dulwich, near journey's end - not that weird, there's obviously plenty of graffiti in London - that always gave me the creeps. It seemed to be a depiction of a normal village green, much like the one it stood upon, but there was something distinctly Wrong with it. The simple, bright colours read as completely unnatural, almost sickly, and for some reason an explosion of light emanated from the tree at the centre. It didn't help that the mural was scarcely visible from Adys Road as we drove to the bakery, partially shrouded by a couple real trees, bathed in amber from the old sodium streetlights you used to get (because by the time we got to Peckham it was always night). It made the mural feel like something I had imagined or fever-dreamed, half-asleep and up past my ...

I hate the 1975. If you follow me on Twitter you already know that, but it's been a while since they've done anything and it always bears repeating. The only good attempt at a defence of The 1975 I've read came from, I think, Steven Hyden: the 1975 are important because there need to be big, fun, hateable rock bands. I see the logic in that: people have to play SOMETHING at parties, and weirdo kids like me need SOMETHING to rebel against. But do them Wilmslow cunts fit the bill? Big - probably the biggest in England, only Arctic Monkeys could really fight them on that. Hateable - my lord, yes. But fun? If I'm remembering rightly, two of the first three songs on their recent album Notes On A Conditional Form  are a plodding orchestral overture and a song where Greta Thunberg tells you to stop littering. Not exactly Van Halen- or Aerosmith-esque party animal good times. And I'm pretty sure Guns 'n' Roses never released an eighty-minute double album full of UK ...

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...

"And I ain't much to hear" - Shame, 'One Rizla' "Lay off the fucking post-punk, all of you" - a friend reviewing 'This Nation's Saving Grace' by The Fall I find the rehabilitation of Brutalism as an architectural form really strange. The current consensus seems to be that everyone is wrong to think massive brown buildings completely incongruous with the surrounding architecture are ugly - witness the invocation of Trump , the most famous idiot in the world, in this piece, for example - and that people simply don't understand how gorgeous they truly are. Brutalist buildings receive elegies on BBC Radio 3, the poshest channel, and we're subjected to headlines like  To Some, Boston City Hall Is An Eyesore. To These Artists, It's Inspiration.   All of this completely misses the point, though. Brutalism is bad because Broadwater Farm erupted in rioting and Ronan Point erupted in flames, because Brasilia rapidly became an overpopula...