Sprezzatura

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 greek gods were like the MCU back in the day — Dan Power (@therealdanpower) October 8, 2020 Remember when Scorsese said he's not crazy about Marvel films, and then everyone got mad, and then Francis Ford Coppola said "I'm backing, though," and then it was a whole big problem? That was eighty-seven years ago, feel old yet? Anyway, let's go back to that. Scorsese wrote a fantastic defence of his position in the New York Times that makes all the filmic points for me, which is good because I know so little about film that I think Garfield II is the pinnacle of modern cinema, but the problem is not that Marvel films are dumb explodey nonsense with simple messages and no 'substance' compared to a gritty Ken Loach character study, and Scorsese knows that. People like fun, dumb stories, and we always have. Bellerophon rode around on a flying horse and solved mysteries. Jupiter and Mercury went around doing epic Expecting Hospitality Off Our Subjects Pr...

I Lads. I've got a scoop. This is the big one. This is what catapults me into the major leagues. I'll have NYT articles casting me as the doyen of the new 'roadman left', which is exactly the same as the regular left except sometimes we say 'pussyhole'; it's all very vulgar , in both senses of the word, and VERY subversive. We're really shifting some paradigms out here. I'll supplant Ash Sarkar as the official one (1) Commie of Colour that you're allowed to see on the TV. It's gonna be a madness. Anyway. Listen. Here's the tea, sweeties: Brands have co-opted Pride in order to sell shit. I know, I know. "How did you figure out something so incredibly not-obvious? No one's been pointing that out on Twitter???" Well, my dears, it all came to me last year. I was invited to spend Pride with my friends in Bristol. I'd never been to a Pride event before, and I wasn't really sure what to expect. I was aware that it p...

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...