Capleton-Lock Up
It’s impossible to hear the vocal from Addictive by Truth Hurts without alarm bells tearing through your brain. So when Capleton manage to work the beat into something altogether more booty shaking, it’s quite a feat. Dancehall is something of a new buzz for me, as anyone who’s been reading ILM will have noticed. I guess it’s got more of an urgency to it than hiphop, and also I bloody love dancing. Lock Up makes me dream of spinning a few CDs in a club full of mates and pulling this as an ace-card, fuck dance lets jump.
Feeling quite stultified lately, possibly by paid writing having ruined my confidence, so maybe I need to get back on my feet where it all started. Or maybe this will make me worse, either way the real point of this post is to say congratulations to all involved in the FT relaunch, if I could make a living out of writing online I would. Tom once wrote his reasons for not writing for pay, I tried to find that piece and failed. But certainly paid writing simply feels like a way to listen to records and get paid for me, rather than any form of communication or art. If people are going to pay me to write then that’s great, but the chances of anything I do meaning anything to me are slim, as far as I can see.
The reality is I have to deal with editors and sub-editors and editors assistants who have no idea why someone wouldn’t like rock music. In these parts it’s easy to forget that some people automatically assume the only way you can’t love indie is by not hearing it due to the corrupt radio filling our ears with dop and pance and all the rest of the “superficial” stuff. When is it ok to have an axe to grind? If I don’t like a rock record I’m given to review, and tear it apart accordingly, the band get a bad review in a magazine with 20, 000 circulation. What about when someone doesn’t like a dance record? Someone ALREADY doesn’t fucking like a dance record, any bloody dance record.
Dance records don’t even reach the point of being torn apart by some wanker, they’re already not popular enough with the writers to get reviewed in the first place. The point being, my prejudices or axes to grind have some potentially productive end result. But it’s no life really, hacking away against an establishment which can never understand the point of the hacking in the first place. You either conform and take small satisfaction from reviewing records you love, or you give up. Either way one thing is clear, writing for money requires you to accept the utter dominance of rock music in every single thing you do. And it’s enough to fuel the fire even more. There’s something greatly ironic in the fact that those who champion silly and goofy and happy music end up the most embittered by trying to do so, and those championing the cult of the serious and the miserable are permanently self satisfied.
The beat goes on.