Warning! Inter-blog battle continues! (except I do actually think I’ve got more general stuff to say too)
us|against|them replies. For what it’s worth again, I thought the British music comment might be a gag, but you never know on the net. And another reason to dig 1965 – it’s just plain hornier. Anyway, real reply time.
I wasn’t expecting to hear the old ‘major labels’ argument again, but there it was. As a pop fan, believe me, I would love it if Spin! and NME were in tune with NYLPM, but something about the idea didn’t ring true. So I checked. 37 major label albums. Not that it matters. I also checked Signal Drench’s list: 45 major label albums. Not that it matters. (I’m not allowing for stuff which was major there but indie here or vice versa. I’m also assuming that on my list Creation is a major, which it wasn’t once upon a time). Since SC think this sort of stuff does matter, they usefully put the label next to each review, which made things easy. Two points spring to mind (general readers start here):
i) What I do, and I’m sure what Us Vs Them do too, is listen to music and work out whether I like it or not, and not care what label it’s on. It matters economically – it matters a lot economically – and I think major labels are broadly speaking greedy corporate scum but the fact is that they aren’t as stupid as we like to paint them, and they do release a lot of good music, as both our lists prove. Caring about whether something’s on a major is a hindrance, aesthetically: I circumvent the economic stuff by nicking most of it anyway.
ii) The thing is, though, that Mark from Us Vs Them looked at my list and saw two things. Firstly lots of English bands, secondly lots of major label bands. He simply didn’t register the stuff he didn’t know about, any more than I twigged the stuff I had never heard of on the SD list. Like filling in the blanks in an optical illusion (or digitally compressed music file!), he either passed over the other stuff or assumed that Position Normal, Fushitsusha et al were more effette English pop tart major shill nonsense. And I in turn assumed that the unknown stuff on the SD list was just more indie rock that I happened not to have heard yet.
The point being that this is something inherent in lists themselves, and a good reason why not to make them: when making a list, you think it will represent the breadth and subtlety of your taste. Reading a list, people say “Oh, he likes Pulp” or whatever, and write you off. So you end up in stupid arguments like this one, but it’s always worth pursuing even the stupidest argument, in case you realise something less stupid at the end of it. In this case, no more lists in Freaky Trigger.
Thankyou for your patience.