Lester Bangs and Paul Morley : Let It Blurt and Nothing: You could very well do worse.[…]

JAMES
They say : “Oh Sit Down.”
Tanya says: “Oh Shut Up”[…]

PUBLIC ENEMY – ARSE WALK WITH ME
There are a number of glaring problems with Public Enemy, not the least that Elvis actually wasn’t really a hero to anyone. I can certainly remember being five and saying “Mummy, when I grow up I wan[…]

Pitchfork reviews the new Future Bible Heroes EP. It’s a fair review and well written, though as often with Pitchfork it’s the little asides that grate or beg expansion: “It’s extremely difficult to write a meaningful synth-po[…]

Thanks to Martin, who has sent me several excellent links over the last week (I’m working through them!), and thanks also to moreover.com, you’ll now find a pop music headlines section in the right-hand column for handy news updates. We&#[…]

Gentleman Jim: “Here were songs of love, loss and yearning by cult artists such as the Church, the Go Betweens and Ed Kuepper, songs that had entered the national psyche, sung by an old-style crooner enjoying a Terry Callier-like renaissance. &[…]

Ironminds: The Savior Is Coming Ironminds is by far the worst rockzine online. Every piece has about a paragraph of opinion puffed into four pages of tiresome off-the-shelf ‘attitude’. They have by and large wretchedly conservative tastes[…]

MEN WHO SING HIGH
If Bono does it, it’s a bad idea. Few of the laws of pop are so immutable, and U2’s lead git is the master criminal of music, responsible for outrages of every stripe (and indeed Stipe), but few as heinous as his habit o[…]

THERE IS NO SWEARING IN “I SWEAR” BY ALL-4-ONE
Swearing is clever, in real life as in music. My objection is to UNNECESSARILY COY SWEARING. This occurs when the artist?s natural predilection for BEING RUDE is suffocated by their label?[…]

I’ve been getting a lot of hits from mailing lists and fan pages this week. Tanya’s rabid onslaught on Pulp attracted the attention of the band’s news site, and my rather gentler Belle And Seb piece has sparked some gratifyingly int[…]