Gasp! Choke! Dissed in Indieshite at last! I have no choice but to join Western Homes in forced retirement. Goodbye, cruel web.
Actually Ernst and co. have hit on a persistent paranoia of mine. I don’t even have access to Netscape, let alone a Mac, and have ‘designed’ all the FT sites from scratch on a crappy free editor I got off a magazine cover CD two years ago. So I am always slightly concerned about how these pages look. If NYLPM is unreadable on a Mac, and you have any idea how to make it less so, please get in touch if only to refer me to a good piece on the subject.
I’d not come across fakejazz.com before - maybe it’s out of the ‘online zineblog loop’ (or maybe, more likely, I am), but I like it a good deal. The writing doesn’t always flow but the people involved always make an honest stab at describing and assessing some fairly uncategorisable music, and they usually do it without recourse to too many rockcrit cliches. The stuff covered initially struck me as your bog-standard indie rock, but a quick poke about their reviews section shows fakejazz’s committment to a much wider range of sounds - any US zine which covers Piano Magic and Nurse With Wound is going to get a thumbs up from me. (via Us Vs Them)
Mmmm, admin: I’ve rejigged the list of websites to your right, categorised them a little and added a few which I’d previously left out. But my memory is imperfect - if you run a music review site, or especially if you run a commentary-based or weblog site, drop me an e-mail and I’ll add you on.
Taken to task by Tim!: SINK seems to suggest that my disdain for the late-90s music press is down to some kind of refracted nostalgia for the music of my (relative) youth, and quotes The Manual’s entirely accurate assertion that every age of pop is a Golden age to the people who live through it. Well, yes, but that wasn’t what I was talking about. Drummond and Cauty are talking about the music, I’m talking about the writing about the music.
Obviously I still like reading about music or I wouldn’t be doing this: if the NME was still a good read, I’d still be buying it, since I actually like a lot of the stuff it does. The lack of credibility I was talking about didn’t so much arise from the music papers’ embrace of Britpop as from their flip-flopping around when albums sold well or relatively flopped. I’m almost certainly being naive in that, as I bet they’ve always done it, but at the time it was another factor in my deciding to quit reading.
The music press was pretty awful when I started listening to indie music: I loved the NME in ‘89 because it made me feel connected and I knew no better, but I’d never hold it up now as quality writing. (Tim also mentions shoegazing, which occasioned another monster slump in the quality of the paper and made me give it up for a year or so, infuriated by the weekly ‘Take Birdland go-karting’ articles.)
We’re the younger generation: really apalling piece on ‘twee’ from Salon. Briefly considers analysis, rejects it, reverts to stereotype. Will annoy lots of people: personally I don’t care much since I’ve hated every one of the bands mentioned aside from B & S and the Smiths (”sweetness and light”, it sez here). But I know hackwork when I see it.
Farewell The Lonely Surfer: Guardian obituary of Spector arranger Jack Nitzche.
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