Blogging the Guardian’s pop pages used to be the easiest thing in the world, back when T.Cox was in charge. Modern music was unforgiveably awful and our only hopes were the Wondermints, Cox said every week before leaving to write a book about golf. Alexis Petridis though has developed the annoying habit of writing affable, reasonable pieces on quite interesting topics, like this week’s “Pop Of The Tots”, an examination of the changing demographics of the singles chart.
If Petridis has a problem as a commentator, though, it’s the classic broadsheet one: over-simplification in order to tell uncommitted readers a story. Much is made of Coldplay’s “In My Place” (this season’s big adult-oriented rock single) only hitting No.2 but S Club Juniors’ “Automatic High” could only manage #2 too – so isn’t that also a failure? And just like in his pop-after-Sept-11 overview of a few weeks back, Petridis doesn’t take hip-hop enough into account – sitting at #3 in the charts right now is Truth Hurts’ “Addictive”, a lot of people’s idea of the sort of great single Petridis ends his piece by celebrating and certainly aimed at a teenage-to-adult audience. ‘Tweenybop’ stars are the biggest slice of the pop cake right now, for sure, but it’s still a pretty huge cake.