Since January I’ve been doing a column in the Guardian every fortnight. These are written for a slightly different audience than my loveable pop-crazy readers here, and it’s also the first time I’ve written regularly for print (web to print is a much bigger shift than unedited to edited, by the way). Even so I thought it might be nice for FT readers who like my stuff to get access to all of them – and frankly it’s useful for me having links in one place too.
The remit of the column is that I’m meant to be jumping off from something that’s happening now – sometimes this is more central to the piece than others.
1. Cheap music and the ‘event single’ (Singles overtake album sales)
2. Indie rock and indirectness. (Spoon’s Transference)
3. The randomness of virality (OK Go griping at their label).
4. What critics get wrong and why (Fall Out Boy split)
5. What does ‘new music’ mean anyway? (6 Music brouhaha)
6. Three types of revivalism (Alphabeat and Goldfrapp LPs)
7. Fans as industry stakeholders (UK Music report on UK industry)
8. Why we want politicians to suck at pop (UK election campaign)
9. Global pop v world music (The Ayobaness! compilation)
10. Pop as a coalition (UK election aftermath)
11. The car-crash that is the UK’s Eurovision strategy (er, Eurovision)
12. Different kinds of populism. (Dizzee’s football single.)
13. Summer jams and the longing for ubiquity. (Katy Perry’s “California Gurls”)
14. Lo-fi as a post-industry survival strategy. (Wavves, Sleigh Bells)
15. The aesthetics of glut (Wiley’s 200 track giveaway)
16. Grown-up-ness in pop (Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs)