The Indie-Rock Boys’ Guide to Indie-Rock Girls

The Indie-Rock Boys’ Guide to Indie-Rock Girls: well, let’s put it this way, if they want a man with an Iggy Pop body, they’d best stay well away from me. On the other hand, I find hairslides intolerable. (via Pearls…)

Kid Rock Starves To Death: MP3 Piracy Blamed

Kid Rock Starves To Death: MP3 Piracy Blamed - everyone will be linking to this one, too. And so they should.

Biblical View of Music

Biblical View of Music: Right. Recent discussions on e-mail have focussed on the difficulties of finding music that everybody likes. Thankfully I have been able to cut through this Gordian Knot with the help of this useful text, which outlines The Lord’s conceptions for music and explains in no small detail (I’d just read the headlines if I were you) what is OBJECTIVELY good and bad. Long-term readers of alt.music.alternative might notice the resemblance between these laws of music and the opinions held by a certain Norwegian poster. I can make no further comment.

Geri lands film role

Geri lands film role, playing a girl perpetually in therapy. How curiously appropriate.

Drug Thesis

Drug Thesis: using music as an investment guide for the culturally-aware dealer. Written in 1997, concludes by telling you to buy lots of acid. It’s three years later and from my limited knowledge of the chemical ’scene’ acid is as unhip now as it was then. So much for that. The music theory doesn’t hold water either. But I’m linking to it because on a search for “happy music” this was the only actual article I could turn up.

NYLPM uses and endorses premium lager.

Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music: More Than This: The Best of…: Pitchfork Review

Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music: More Than This: The Best of…: Pitchfork Review “While ignorant rich people do enjoy music to a limited extent, the infinite pleasures of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits or Wings’ Greatest could never compare to playing a semi-competitive round of golf with Stan and Larry from the office” - and so on and so on: dreary rant from shitheel indie-snob student which manages to offer no insight at all into Roxy’s music but plenty of insight into the workings of a lazy mind.

What a good mood I’m in today.

Sonic Youth: NYC Ghosts & Flowers: Pitchfork Review

Sonic Youth: NYC Ghosts & Flowers: Pitchfork Review - of course everyone’s going to be linking to this. Pitchfork continues to turn into the NME, and this is the equivalent of that mag’s wannabe-notorious Stereolab review, even unto the crass nose-thumbings at the avant-garde.

Not that I’m disagreeing that NYC Ghosts And Flowers is a bad album - I’ve not heard it, but I didn’t much like their last five or so. But it’s pretty clear that Pitchfork’s good writerness is way overwhelming their points-to-makeness.

Anywaym the new SY album would have to be pretty fucking bad to be as bad as the new Grandaddy album.

THE ENGLISH TAPE, SIDE 2 TRACK 10

THE ENGLISH TAPE, SIDE 2 TRACK 10
MOTORHEAD - “We Are The Road Crew” (from the album All The Aces, and doubtless many others)
Brit-metal tends to either the fantastical or the brutally down-to-earth. Which side are Motorhead on, I wonder? “We Are The Road Crew” is a greasily empathic slog through the forgotten and hideous towns of England and Europe, a grind of jokes, drugs, women, but mostly just hard and boring work. It’s not their hardest rocking track by a country mile, but it’s possibly their most heartfelt.

THE ENGLISH TAPE, SIDE 2 TRACK 9

THE ENGLISH TAPE, SIDE 2 TRACK 9
STAR TURN ON 45 PINTS - “Pump Up The Bitter” (7″ single)
In England, the ‘answer record’ long since got elided into the ‘novelty record’ - our Top 40 is unparallelled in its adherence to these works of tat or genius, which are often unwittingly revealing, they being the only records large chunks of the population ever buy. Since the public perception of house music in ‘88 was as an entire novelty genre, it was seen as particularly fair game, and a rash of puny parody-house tracks broke out on the pop charts that Summer. One of them was “Pump Up The Bitter”, which stands out for being genuinely very funny, or would do were it not for some highly uncomfortable gags about one “Mrs.Patel”, who replaces Ofra Haza on this relocation of M/A/R/R/S’ “Pump Up The Volume” from nightclub to Working Men’s Club. Even then, the discomfort’s as much to do with early house’s cut’n'pase exploitation of the ‘exotic’ as it is for the track’s transformation of same into overt bigotry. As for the rest, the sampled drums are replaced by a man playing the spoons, the sampled speech-snippets handed to a comedy MC, and metropolitan cool is effectively pricked.