The signature sounds of the 00s pop boom – all those staccatos, pizzicatos, clicks and bubbles – fix this track in its era even as the central, taunting string figure calls further back to long-ago good times, now soured. “Hit Em Up[…]

This is one of the great contemporary London songs for me, one of the small cross-genre epics the city throws out sometimes, like “Weekender” or “Avenue” in the early 90s – not through any particular lyric but something […]

One of the most contentious threads I can remember on ILX was over a blogpost by Ultragrrrl claiming that My Chemical Romance were “this generation’s Nirvana”. OK, the thread was contentious more because Ultragrrrl herself was a div[…]

Perhaps icons inevitably try to upstage each other. Madonna, given the chance at a 007 theme song, is provoked into her most radical 00s single. Also – to be fair – one of her most divisive: it got abuse both from Bond purists who deteste[…]

I was playing this record quite a lot while I put the final edits on my “Decade In Pop” piece for Pitchfork: now I wish I’d mentioned it. It’s producer Rich Harrison’s pet girlband project, and for once that patronising […]

One of the minor and miserable themes of my 00s has been the generally vain search for a British indie hype that I could enjoy. I’ve never consciously acknowledged this itch but the fact I once paid money for a CD by The Coral suggests it&#8217[…]

A little over ten years ago I started writing about my Top 100 Singles Of The 90s. Pretty much as soon as I’d finished I started looking forward to writing this feature on Freaky Trigger. In between, this site has – directly or indirectly[…]

Clearly the most significant aspect of England’s qualification for next year’s FIFA World Cup is that it allows the nation once again to dream of victory in the Pop World Cup. This tournament, to find the world’s greatest pop nation[…]

Well, here it is – my essay on the “Decade in Pop” for Pitchfork. The last time I read it through, which was also about the 50th time, I thought it was pretty good, but I’ve lost all distance.
The angle I took was to write it […]

No more pop generation gap, claims this survey by Pew Internet. “There’s now broad agreement across the generations about one realm of American culture that had been an intense battlefield in the 1960s: the music.” (more…)[…]