LOUISE MUST GO!
An excellent theory we came up with on Saturday morning: Britpop existed primarily because nobody had invented Big Brother yet. Self-obsessed twentysomething so-called every(wo)men desperate to be catapulted from new town obscurity in[…]

Reason to Rock: Rock Music as Art Form: I couldn’t begin to summarise this one.[…]

TOM’S TOP TEN!
Thanks to the usual sources (gabba.net, FilePile, record shops and now SoulSeek, which I’m on under the name “Groke”)
OUTKAST – “Land Of A Million Drums”
UNKNOWN ARTIST – “Dhol Beat[…]

The Beautiful Anthem: Brazil has the best national anthem, sez the Guardian. Is this true? Fingers crossed we only get one more chance to find out this year. It can’t be much worse than England’s inert, interminable offering, the “H[…]

The NYLPM Archives get their six-monthly update. Relive all your favourite pop reviewing moments![…]

You might have noticed that it’s been almost a month since Freaky Trigger got updated. This is squarely down to the World Cup, which has been taking up most of my every morning for the last three weeks, neatly eating up a proportion of time I m[…]

A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing
Why is Rakim good? I asked Google this question and here’s what it told me: “Rakim’s peerless skills on the mic…the greatest MC the genre has known…to use Rakim [on a track] is to […]

MIS-TEEQ – “Roll On”
You’d have thought the current Asian-samples vogue in hip-hop would have been something UK producers picked up on quick and did well, given that “Get Ur Freak On”, “Addicted”, &#822[…]

Is Pop Cool?
I got an interesting e-mail last week. Ben Rayner, a writer for the Toronto Star, wrote to me asking for a couple of quotes for a column he was writing about pop music. Because of the World Cup, I’ve not been checking my e-mail muc[…]

THE PRODIGY – “Baby’s Got A Temper”
The best bit of this record is the cheeky “Firestarter” quote about thirty seconds in – a blipvert reminder of who the long-gone Prodigy are, and a dash of swagger in a tra[…]