So if, as Ned says in the comments box to my blog post, yr online self is necessarily dissipated these days, why not use blogging as a way of bringing it together? If I feel this ‘works’ I’ll try to do it regularly – this is a hotchpotch of opinions I’ve spouted elsewhere online in the last day or so on Radiohead, teenpop, non-teen pop, fillums and suchlike which don’t really feel workable into full blog posts (also some of them are unformed to say the least).
– Lots of people have been talking about how amazing it is that everyone can hear the radiohead album together. But almost every great ILM album thread from the last 5 years is “so many people listening to an album together for the first time”! (And new people joining in as the leak spreads). Rhead’s masterstroke has been working out how to combine that excitement, which is totally a download-age thing, with the pre-download excitement of a fixed release date so you can anticipate the excitement too.
– I agree with Dave Moore that the niche marketing of teenpop is (beyond the actual music) the most interesting thing about it in 07. I’d make a direct parallel between that and the way fiction for teenagers got its own niche – if yr an adult you might read kids books but I don’t see many adults into whatever the Sweet Valley High equivalents are nowadays (or the 12yr-old boy gore-lit – maybe teenpop needs a new Alice Cooper equivalent to Darren Shan!). And generally there’s a will within the culture to give teenagers their own space – under-18s discos, teen social networks etc. – which is sort of responding to actual teen demand but also makes them much more marketable to. With pop though it’s a slightly different trend because ‘respond to inchoate adolescent desires’ has always been so much a part of the mainstream remit, so section teens off and what happens to the rest of pop – is it going to be like the horrible ‘adultisation’ of comics, where thrill-power has been banished in favour of pseudo-sophistication?
– In fact it is happening already :(:(:( the list of favourite Facebook music linked on Poptimists the other day was miserable but the qn is WHY do I dislike it so much? I think it’s the way this stuff is so unembarrassing, even potentally, it’s like the formula for “acceptable music” has been found and it turns out to be mid-paced rock by an endless turnover of vaguely trendy young men. I don’t want cool or even tepid, I want vulgarity! Mind you I thought the same about clothes and hairstyles in the mid-90s, that a Fukuyama style end of hist. had been reached (and they WERE rly boring) but people snapped out of it and look much hotter and funnier and stupider now (I remain as rub a dresser as always of course). I’m tempted to blame this on Radio 1, the inevitable consequence of their giving up on Smashie and Nicey et al. But I hated the Smashie/Nicey R1 quite a lot too, they’ve just replaced phoney enthusiasm for life with phoney enthusiasm for music.
– On a totally unrelated matter, I rly like the new Kylie single and I have not as much sympathy as I should have with people disappointed in it because it sounds exactly like the demo (or ‘original’) – this is what comes of crate-digging for pop on the net dudes! Let thy demos be demos! Of course they’d say “it’s just a bad song” and fair enough (but it’s not – it’s like a pop PJ Harvey!) (/lexbaiting). Love the skull-faced mic in the video.
– Finally fillum corner: The Dark Is Rising – the whole sequence really – seems like it wd be much better suited to an old school BBC kids teatime production than a “modern fantasy” film, the kind of lavish one they (admittedly) don’t actually make any more. (Yes I was thinking of the Box Of Delights, what of it). It’s not an especially ‘big budget’ book is it? Maybe the last one is but that’s rub anyway. But all the first four are totally designed to be acted by proper old British character actors and precocious middle class kids. I agree with assorted complainers that it makes no literary sense to have Will Stanton be an alium (ok not a real alium but you never know) – doesn’t make any marketing sense either since the films it is trying to piggyback to success have proved that there is a huge worldwide audience for Brit kids as stars. (If you want to know what people are complaining about there is a point-by-point comparison here, but this kind of obsessive detailing always makes me want to betray my fannishness: I end up thinking “The director is completely right and actually it would have been better if Will was a ninja who befriends a robot triceratops.”)