About the same time we passed 5000 comments*, so 20 out of 21 comments are spam**. Nice. Many many thanks to akismet.com and the “Worst Offenders” plugin.
Free fun FT fact: we are now mobile phone friendly (looks like this)
(*RIP the comments lost in the great haloscan massacre)
(**The real proportion is even worse because the 100,000 is comments since we went WP in, er July??, and comments have been accumulating on Popular for some time prior to that, using Blogger comments)
admin in FT • No Comments
Strange statues around the world
77 of the oddest civic sculptures scavenged from the net. Some might be considered NSFW, but well worth the risk.
admin in FT • Comments Off
List of Fictional Curse Words
A cleaner, geekier, telefantasy-biased, version of Rogers Profanisaurus. You fracking knuckleheaded McSpazzmatron.
admin in FT • No Comments
Websites as Graphs
Pretty java graphical representation of a website. The process of drawing is prettier than the result. Wish it told you more about what the nodes represent.
admin in FT • No Comments
Come and Get It – Rachel Stevens
Mysteriously unsuccessful album of the year 2005
Amazon»
admin in FT • No Comments
It’s a rotating panel of Interweb pop pundits – they get sent an MP3 by me (that is, Tom) about once every three days and they comment on each one, giving it a mark out of ten. The collated comments and overall mark then appear on NYLPM.
Does The Membership Change?
After 12 MP3s have been voted on a ’round’ of the Square Table is over and there’s a reshuffle – some people from the waiting list come onto the panel, some people from the panel go back on the waiting list. The four most popular files each ’round’ go through to the Square Table Live Showdown at Club Freaky Trigger, which happens once every three rounds (i.e. about three times a year).
How Do I Join?
You email us at freakytrigger at gmail dot com. The only requirements are i) not minding seeing your comments up on the site and ii) having an email account that can cope with regular 5MB file sends.
alext
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s the one that’s playing now
[*]I LIKE POP TO…perve, pretend, pout, pose, preen, ponce, posture, pastiche, parody, problematise, perform, profess and play.
[*]I DON’T LIKE POP TO… pander, prescribe, predict or prefer.
Anthony Easton
my favourite song of the 00s is hit me baby one more time
[*]i like pop to astonish me, make me hard, make me want to fall in love, make me want to fall out of love, make me shake my money maker, make me roll down the windows and sing along in the middle of summer.
[*]i dont like pop to bore me or to really make me think.
Bushra
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s: ask me in 2010
[*]I LIKE POP TO…scare the goth kids away every time it’s played in[*]Claire’s Accessories.
[*]I DON’T LIKE POP TO…wear green nail varnish.
Cis
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s: ‘nsync, ‘gone’
[*]I LIKE POP TO… bounce, blast, make you dance and sing under your[*]breath in embarrassing public.[*]
I DON’T LIKE POP TO… take itself too seriously, whinge, think it’s indie.
Daniel Reifferscheid
I Like Pop To: Grab every piece of hook and mentalism that it can gets its hands on, without feeling bloated. Also if it’s sung by aging philosophers then that’s a plus too.
I Don’t Like Pop To: sound like “Frankenstein” by The Edgar Winter Group. Guys, I know it’s tempting, but NO.
David Raposa
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s: “Bootylicious” – Destiny’s Child OR “Back To School” – Deftones
[*]I LIKE POP TO…make me breakfast
[*]I DON’T LIKE POP TO…burn my toast
Derek Walmsley
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s- Sean Paul- Get Busy
[*]I LIKE POP TO- seduce with the promise of alternative, parallel lives
[*]I DON’T LIKE POP TO- be uncritically British.
Diego Valladolid
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s “Libertine (Radio Edit)” by Kate Ryan
[*]I LIKE POP TO… introduce gross amounts of distortion to the speaker,[*]eventually destroying it.
[*]I DON’T LIKE POP TO… be reproduced as accurately to the source as possible.
Forksclovetofu
Fave Pops song of 00′s: B.O.B.? Toxic? Gossip People? Country[*]Grammar? I’m torn.
[*]ILIKEPOPTO: surprise me, popularize unlikely dark corners, blow up[*]th’ joint, shake up the status quo, remix/chop/screw, move my ass,[*]embarrass the hipsters and ruffle the squares, explore new niches.
[*]IDON”TLIKEPOPTO: make everybody go “not that song AGAIN”, get TOO[*]clever, recycle beat/concept/cliche X for the nth time, involve[*]Puffy, inspire drunken beatings, be sung offkey loudly on the subway[*]by people other than me and a select group of hangers[*]on/roustabouts/hallucinations.
George Kelly
Favorite pop song of ’00s: Daft Punk’s “Harder Better Faster Stronger”
[*]I like pop to: forget to remember to forget, and to fail interestingly[*]at its experiments.
[*]I don’t like pop to: forget how to pander to the Big, the Dumb, the Obvious.
Martin Skidmore
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s um, probably Crazy In Love
[*]I LIKE POP TO… bounce
[*]I DON’T LIKE POP TO… whine
Jel
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s: * Avril Lavigne – Complicated * Christina Milian – Dip It Low * Evanescence – Bring Me To Life * Busted – Crashed the Wedding * Girls Aloud – Sound of the Underground * Kelly Osborne – Shut Up * Sum 41 – Fat Lip
[*]I LIKE POP TO… Be hummable
[*]I DON’T LIKE POP TO… be anything other than pop
Michael Daddino
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s: Does Archigram’s “Carnaval” count? If not, then “A Stroke of Genius.”
[*]I LIKE POP TO…: Involve matching suits, implicit consumerist critique, and songs about crippling anxiety.
[*][*]I DON’T LIKE POP TO…: Hey, I like Godard just as much as anybody, but I don’t like it when pop draws too much attention to the artifice involved. This isn’t a demand for realism so much as a demand the illusion that pop offers to be relatively seamless. When it’s not seamless – when I have to think about the overdone application of autotune or the star’s fucked-up “real life” – it’s a distraction that makes the pleasures of engaged listening impossible.
Pete
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s Bring Me To Life – Evenessence
[*]I LIKE POP TO…Shake my arse
[*]I DON’T LIKE POP TO… Wipe my arse
Sarah C
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00S: Bladdy hell this is hard. I cant think of anything. It’s Monday. I’ll get back to you.
[*]I LIKE POP TO…: snap and crackle
[*]I DON’T LIKE POP TO…: go soggy and or possibly encompass SNOW PATROL. SNOW PATROL! Did you see them on BBC3 last night? I mean, it’s not peonic TV and I only saw it cos I was round a posh mates house, and he made us watch it, I dunno, but he said Snow Patrol were better than the Strokes and I was like: here’s me: WA?! and then he said yeah but no but yeah but no but yeah they’re RUBBISH, aren’t they?
Steve M
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s: Freelance Hellraiser ‘A Stroke Of Genie-us’
[*]I LIKE POP TO…: grab my hand and say ‘come with me’ (‘Digital Love’) or ‘look at it this way’ (‘Overload’) or ‘let me tell you a story’ (‘Don’t You Want Me’) and leave no doubt it was the right choice
I DON’T LIKE POP TO…: lack ambition or belief, or indeed a good hook.
Stevie Nixed
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s Ushah’s “Yeah” I have supah dupah short memory[*]span
[*]I LIKE POP TO… Kidnap my hips
[*]I DON’T LIKE POP TO… Unhook the left frontal lobes
William B Swygart
FAVOURITE POP SONG OF THE 00s The Delgados – Witness
[*]I LIKE POP TO… move me like it means it.
[*]I DON’T LIKE POP TO… ‘push the buttons’. Also, sneering.
admin in FT • No Comments
Tom Ewing’s Bit
THE RAPTURE
Almost everybody else I was with hated the Rapture. I loved them. I know the songs on the much-leaked album quite well, but that wasn’t why. The thing was, by Sunday afternoon I was sick of Glastonbury, I just didn’t know it. I was sick of the sunshine, the good feelings, the optimism, the chirpy cynicism of those cunting Q handouts, the remorselessly chugging music – I may even have been sick of indie girls in bikini tops. The Rapture, a band who have released no actual records in Britain and whose most famous song was known to maybe one-thousandth of the Festival, were put on the second-biggest stage at six in the evening. Did they win the crowd over? Did they bollocks – they played the spikiest, trebliest, scrappiest set of the whole weekend. Camp falsetto, ear-basting guitars, baking-soda disco rhythms – it was fucking horrible and I adored every second. Finally Bez came on to reward us and remind the Rapture about ‘fun’. They played ‘House Of Jealous Lovers’ and we freaky-danced like the good little masochists we were.
THE DARKNESS
My theory: much great pop music eventually turns out to be ridiculous, and more ridiculous music turns out to be great. Adam Ant’s axiom: ridicule is nothing to be scared of. If you love ridiculous music, as The Darkness might but probably wouldn’t tell you, make it more so. They gaze into the powdered face of schlock-metal and do not blink. Justin Hawkins has flames on his belly and a nice line in the splits. He also has two or three thunderously fine tunes – just as well, otherwise The Darkness would be pastiche, a metal Barron Knights, not the weekend’s most winning band.
CANDLE-POWERED BOATS
The apex of hippie craftsmanship.
JOHN CALE
Cale headlined to a half-empty new bands tent on the Saturday night, most of his crowd I’d guess lured away by Radiohead. I’d take one of Cale’s frozen-over ballads over any Radiohead song (even the very good ones!), and sorry to sound like a snob but Music For A New Society templates the Thom Yorke stance and pushes it into places that I suspect are just too stark for a five-piece band to go. It’s such a powerful record that I don’t even like it, but I certainly respect it, and respect is what carried me through most of John Cale’s set. New songs, made with synths and laptops and old session rockers by the sound of it – away from the man’s aura I suspect that they were rubbish, and there was much relief among the Dads when ‘Venus In Furs’ started up. Highlight for me was a gleeful ‘Paris 1919′ – directly afterwards Cale, with a horrid glint in his eye, played a gut-churning V/Vm style glitch-grind racket. After two disgusting minutes he started singing and we realized this was a version of ‘Fear’. The man next to me had been shouting for it all night.
2 MANY DJS
The not-so-secret of 2 Many DJs is out: their set, give or take a Benny Benassi, is an indie disco. We twigged this when they played ‘She Sells Sanctuary’ – the looks of delighted recognition among Steve, me, Alan et al were I fear a piteous sight. ‘Cannonball’ we knew about from the album of course (their set had a dispiriting ‘hits’/'new stuff’ dynamic to it, its only flaw really), but when they started on ‘Fool’s Gold’ we could only laugh. ‘They’re just taking the piss now,’ said Steve. Next stop Kennedy.
THE LONDON LLOYD WEBBER ORCHESTRA
If by any chance you’re reading this, and you were camping by the new bands tent this year, and on the Sunday night your Moby-induced chill was disturbed by a bunch of fuckwits playing Performance: The Greatest Hits Of Andrew Lloyd Webber on the world’s cheapest cassette recorder, and singing along, and holding the player above their heads, and trying to do a comedy falsetto to ‘Memories’, and then putting on some dancehall which sampled ‘Eye Of The Tiger’…we’re very sorry, very sorry indeed.
Andrew Farrell’s Bit
I probably said half a dozen times over the weekend that festival bands are to bands what airline movies are to movies (or internet downloads to singles): if it looks like it might be a good idea, there’s no reason not to try it. You’re hanging around anyway, right?
So people go to stuff, and wander into to stuff, and experience things they hadn’t intended to (cause that’s the point, maaaan). So there’s probably no reason to imagine that everyone at the Vice Party on friday night (in what used to be the Rizla Tent) was there to listen to Erol Alkan, or the Audio Bullys or because it was a great time last year, or even because it was open after midnight. It might’ve been some or more or less of these, but they were there to dance.
And Erol slapped on the chart hits, and at some point a serious bassline was heard, and whooping started. Everyone liked the hell out of this, whatever it was, and it was going to start. And it was White Stripes’s Seven Nation Army, and everyone went on loving it. And singing. And dancing. And dancing.
And then it was Saturday Night, and 2manyDJs, and the continued search for that moment again. And they play Seven Nation Army to an equally loud reception, and then a few minutes later, the guitars play a song I’ve known for ten years, and me and my friends are rocking out to The Cult’s She Sells Sanctuary, and so’s everyone. DJ Swamp had the slot before and was rubbish, playing a trick-heavy set that included murdering Smells Like Teen Spirit. As luck would have it, 2manyDJs are packing Lithium, and they show how to do it.
And then it was Tuesday back in Dublin, and I’m dropping by a computer game store on the way into work, and they’re playing a bootleg of Bootylicious over Smells Like Teen Spirit, which I’ve heard before, and thought it was pretty clever, and I realise that it isn’t just clever, it’s great. I used to love one, and now I love the other as well, and I’m not alone. Both the songs have ascended to the same heaven, and they’re still not the same song. It’s girls versus boys and both sides win.
(Ironically, Erol’s proper set in the Dance Tent was pretty much identical to the Vice one)
Steve Hewitt’s Bit
RECOLLECTIONS OF THURSDAY CANCELLED DUE TO PERRY
Friday, and, before the rain, The Darkness. Now, I was quite pro The Darkness before this and it was my enthusiasm that got several people off their behinds and over to the pyramid at the unreasonable time of half past ten. And it was so worth it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band win over an audience quite so spectacularly. Where to start? Costume changes, Justin playing guitar behind his head, that cover of street spirit? Don’t give me that blah, blah, they must be ironic and knowing bollocks, this is PROPER ROCK with screechy high-pitched vocals and everything, but more importantly, an ability to write damn good pop tunes and share the fantastic time you are having with the audience. To use a phrase not often heard since the Gay Dad debacle, The Darkness are The Best New Band In Britain.
Saturday, and after wandering back from the cabaret tent via dancing to The Smiths outside the herbal high tent and the tastiest chips ever (well that’s what they tasted like at the time, I was possibly not entirely sober), I walked past the dance tent, silent and deserted, the ground inside strewn with thousands of empty beer cups and water bottles. Four pure white scans roved over detritus, making their patterns for their own amusement seemingly. I stood and watched for a couple of minutes until the lighting guy moved onto his next pre-set for the following day.
Sunday afternoon, and after feeling a bit tired and low in the morning, I met up with the gang once more in time for the Sugababes. Looking around at the sunburnt smiling mob I felt yet another (non-chemically enhanced, I assure you) rush of love for this four days of madness. Oh and the Sugababes were alright too, but it’s not really about the music.
Then to top it off I spotted the ace of trumps in indie t-shirt bingo (if that’s not too mixed a metaphor), a Sultans Of Ping FC WHERE’S ME JUMPER t-shirt. The girl wearing it seemed somewhat bemused when I told her she’d won, pity we didn’t have an actual prize to give her…
admin in FT • No Comments
National Talk Like A Pirate Day
