The Meaning of Country Music
If the top twenty on Country Music Video is any indication, concern about a pop invasion is a fuss about very little. These songs, and the images that accompany them, are comforting in their nostalgia for a world of conse[…]

Pop-Eye, 28th April 2002
Truly dreadful No.1 hits are rarer than you’d think – leaving out charity singles and Westlife’s perennially useless stool-pop, I can’t think of a really ghastly, what-has-gone-wrong-with-our-species t[…]

City Rockers Presents Futurism
I first heard “Sunglasses at Night” by Tiga and Zyntherius in a ridiculously packed club. (more…)[…]

We Will Never Give It Up
I have never really made mix tapes or discs or things like that for myself. For others, yes, sometimes due to love, other times due to, well, education (starting in 1994 or so, after a complaint from my mom that all my genera[…]

Tweet – Southern Hummingbird
I like to talk about album covers, because they’re usually the most succinct statement of artistic or commercial intent in the course of a work. The cover of Tweet’s Southern Hummingbird is no exception.[…]

I’ve just returned home after spending six weeks in Egypt. I can’t pretend I developed much of a liking for Egyptian pop – it featured voices flying all over the place at complete random with an annoying nasal tone, and songs that w[…]

The Qt Of Blood Technique
Having spent the latter half of 1999 away from tape making due to self-imposed mix detox, the acquisition of a CD burner during that year’s Yuletide sent me back into the hobby with a mad frenzy. I didn’t fall of[…]

Emergency Ward
Art‘s “Ugly People with Fancy Hairdos”–just the intro, please, none of that “we’re all boat people” stuff–is one of the most vicious songs I’ve ever heard, a sneering indictment of […]

102 Beats That
Freaky Trigger – remarkably – is three in March. I’d like to do something to commemmorate that, and here’s what I’ve come up with.
What is FT all about? Records, mostly. Not just the records themselves &#8[…]

There’s too much love to go around these days
How much do you think I like music? Sometimes I get e-mails, angry about this or that, telling me I don’t like it at all. Sometimes I’m inclined to agree. Every now and then a poster pop[…]