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[…]

Timbaland: Greatest Pop Producer of the Last 10 Years? (96-Present Division)
People have perpetually been predicting Tim’s falling off since 1998 (cf. Simon Reynolds, et al only a year after his ascendancy — even yours truly was ready to […]

VANESSA CARLTON – “A Thousand Miles”
At first, I wasn’t all that impressed. The Proclaimers were willing to go 1,000 miles – 2,000 miles net (if you count the distances traveled by both brothers, ideally to different wo[…]

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[…]

It May Not Be Hot – But It Sure Is Warm
This tape was made for me in April 1998 by a Dutch music journalist as a prize for coming second in an online pop lyrics quiz held on a mailing list I was on. The top three were all called Graham or Graem[…]

Haha few things bettah than having yr sincere prejudices confirmed by unmoored gossip. Spent an evening with two relatives who work in the TV documentary industry. Relative X had just seen the Nick Broomfield doc on Tupac: verdict = ‘total meh&[…]

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[…]