Saw New Moon tonight. Survived the emoness of the film, though was disappointed by the halfhearted emo-ness of the soundtrack. Yes Death Cab For Cutie, yes Lykke Li, and how you managed to get proto-emo Thom Yorke on the soundtrack I don’t know[…]

It’s an all too common problem for the modern web surfer. There you are, browsing the internet, when suddenly you encounter a blog post informing you of the death of hip-hop. Shock! Horror! Why were you not informed?! Can it be so? While our ow[…]

There are 15 cover versions of Wuthering Heights on Spotify. They are all here in this playlist. Since Tom has covered everything I could say about the original here, I thought I’d look at these versions instead to see if there is a secret abou[…]

Last year’s series of X Factor was far from depressing for fans of well-sung pop. If you were posted to Outer Mongolia last Christmas, here is a quick catch-up: Alexandra ‘Leona II’ Burke received the highest number of audience vote[…]

Pop giant Sweden failed to make the final 32.
We’re looking for people who want to manage a team in next year’s Pop World Cup.
If you don’t know the concept of the Pop World Cup, it’s simple. Tracks from participating countrie[…]

On Twitter yesterday, while writing the Pet Shop Boys entry, I asked “Who is the most intelligent person in pop?” – I got a lot of replies, so here is a list of all the crowdsourced nominations, from Lady Gaga to Clint Poppie.
The l[…]

What I said about “Young Boy” back in 2002 on this site:
“My favourite Neptunes production trick is their most retro- the explosive-horns-and-shouting thing you get here and to some extent on Beyonce’s ‘Work It Out’. It’s w[…]

During the 00s pop boom there was much talk of “blankness” as a vocal quality – the kind of competent, unaffected but largely inexpressive singing women like Rachel Stevens do on their records. This was making a virtue of necessity […]

(This is the second part of a piece on managing long blog projects. The first part is here.)
Popular’s main strength – and I’m very proud of this indeed – are its regular 50-post comment threads that are lucid, civil, wide-ranging, full of he[…]

In September 2003 I started a blogging project: six years later, I’m halfway through it. It seems like a good time to put down in writing what – if anything – I’ve learned through doing Popular: what I got right and what I got wrong.
Not the […]