Sprezzatura

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...

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 so, finally, to Cracked. The great thing about Cracked is that there are actually a lot of different reasons why its Google Trends graph looks like this: There's a lot to unpack here. Let's get to work. Reason #1 - Business Idiocy I was recently laid off but at least there isn't a fire moving towards my home here in Westwood. Now to take a sip of water, go outside and — Daniel O'Brien (@DOB_INC) December 6, 2017 The conventional wisdom behind the fall of Cracked is the fact than in late 2017, their parent company, E.W. Scripps, fired everybody talented. This happened to come down very heavily on the side of the video production team that produced things like After Hours and Some News. On the face of it, this seems like a pretty succinct explanation. Firstly, we know how dumb companies can be , so "they fired their whole staff" doesn't even sound like much of a stretch. Secondly, to be more charitable, there was a big realisation at the e...

I think I said in an earlier post that Gamergate was when everything fell apart. I was wrong. It was Atheism+. I'll be honest, this article is only tangentially about Atheism+, because I can't really begin to bring myself to read up on Internet drama from 6-7 years ago, let alone make you lot read it, but does anyone else even remember this shit? Or is it just me? I Let's backtrack a second. I'm not particularly religious. I make the odd reference to the Bible from time to time, and I say masha'allah and oxala too (at the end of the HSBC post , for example), but that's not because of strongly held beliefs - it's just the culture I was raised in. I think Quakers are pretty cool (they seem like the least problematic sect of Christianity at least, and we all love oats, sweets , and not going to war), and Laughing Stock is definitely the greatest album of all time; I suppose all this makes me culturally Christian, but you still won't catch me in c...