The lyrics from “Two Tribes” as Jack Kirby next-issue boxes, by Al Ewing from a concept by me. More here[…]

Here’s something I did for fun yesterday: a graph showing the % of UK #1 hits with female lead vocals, year by year. (Shared male/female leads counted half)*.

(Click on it if you want it a bit clearer).
The red bars are the percentage of femal[…]

Frustrating thinkpiece by Ann Powers on Lady Gaga and an apparent turn to theatricality in pop. Frustrating because what I want it to do is zero in a bit more on what Gaga’s “persona” that “never breaks” is and instead i[…]

Future history as outlined by Google.

WORLD WAR III: Has its own Wikipedia page which is inconclusive as to whether this has already happened.
WORLD WAR IV: The “Long Struggle Against Islamofascism”. We’re apparently in this one. T[…]

The music video for Sons Of Maxwell’s “United Breaks Guitars” has racked up almost 3.5 million hits in just over two weeks. You can’t buy the MP3 anywhere and it’s by a band you’ve almost certainly never heard of: […]

It might have been the death of Steven Wells, or the closure of VIBE, or just people having a tired old moan, but there’s been a lot of mulling over the state of music writing this last couple of weeks. It seemed to me that one obvious thing to[…]

NEVER BEFORE Has Such An Array Of THRILLING GUEST-STARS Been Assembled In One Pitchfork Column!! Chris Weingarten! Simon Reynolds! Steven Wells! Frank Kogan! Chuck Eddy! Mark Sinker! Seth Godin! Tim Finney!
BEHOLD — The Final Fate Of The POP CH[…]

Last week I posted a list of my favourites among my own 2009 pieces. I also asked people on Twitter to tell me what their favourite thing THEY’D written this year was, promising a bit of link love. And here it is! No editing or vetting – […]

It’s halfway through 2009, and for once I’m going to be completely shameless: here are links to the best dozen things I’ve written so far this year. Almost all of them are quite long: if you don’t like long pieces, click no fu[…]

So I listened to the UK Top 40 on Radio 1 for the first time in – oh, I don’t know, years. Like a lot of the audience, I was ambulance-chasing: I wanted to see how the download-led charts would cope with a superstar death. I was hoping &#[…]