The News Review:
- Is now a good time to be a rock and pop fan?
- Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas Texas | Arts & Entertainmen…
- 2006 Brought to You by You
- A postcard from Iceland
- Roses a lounge that stays open till 5 am
- Nobody likes us we care
Is now a good time to be a rock and pop fan?
Times nline – Dec 10, 2006
Used on article pages to rotate the images of a story. The greatest year in the history of the creation of popular music was 1971. There are some persuasive arguments for 1970 but 1971 clinches it — being the year of both There’s a Riot Goin’ n and Led Zeppelin IV the year when both black and white musical forms were at their most symbiotic when technology was at its most crisp. You’ve no doubt heard it all before — mainly because it’s true… I know I’d rather live in my own folky psychedelic version of the 1970s than the smelly one where the Bay City Rollers Spam and nylon hadn’t been conveniently outlawed on grounds of decorum. ne of the best things about the MP3 revolution is that it has democratised taste and time. All those silly rules about not being able to listen to prog if you listened to punk not being able to listen to American lo-fi if you listened to Britpop — they’re pretty much gone now. If someone tells you that early Elton John is rubbish you don’t have to take their word for it; you can check without opening your wallet. Yes even Elton is on MySpace now. The time of the iPod is not just about pretentious eclecticism. It’s about common sense.
Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas Texas | Arts & Entertainmen…
Dallas Morning News – Dec 10, 2006
has no classical-music magazine comparable to England’s Gramophone or BBC Music. In the age of Borat and Punk’d and Rush Limbaugh some will cite this as evidence of the erosion if not utter demise of Western civilization. But the high visibility of Britten Shostakovich and Copland was itself a fluke born of a fortuitous confluence of media and politics with art. The notion of high-art music as middle-class entertainment didn’t really flourish until the second quarter of the 19th century. Tchaikovsky and Dvorák in the later years of the century may have been the first composers with major international reputations in part because they were so identified with newly heightened national identities.
2006 Brought to You by You
New York Times – Dec 10, 2006
They could spend millions of dollars to make and market blockbuster hits to place them in theaters or get them played on radio and MTV. They owned the factories that could press vinyl albums and make the first CDs before the days of the home CD burner and MP3s. Independent types could and did release their own work but they couldn’t match the scale of the established entertainment business. Skip to next paragraph RelatedAudio: Jon Pareles on User-Generated Content… But they are gaining. Low-budget recording and the Internet have handed production and distribution back to artists and one-stop collections of user-generated content give audiences a chance to find their works. With gatekeepers out of the way it’s possible to realize the do-it-yourself dreams of punk and hip-hop to circle back to the kind of homemade art that existed long before media conglomerates and mass distribution. But that art doesn’t stay close to home. nline it moves breathtakingly fast and far. Folk cultures often work incrementally adding bits of individuality to a well-established tradition with time and memory determining what will last. In the user-generated realm tradition is anything prerecorded and all existing works seem to be there for the taking copyrights aside.
A postcard from Iceland
The bserver – Dec 10, 2006
And I could say the same thing about the local music scene. The story about the originality and purity of Icelandic music is the result of a misguided media frenzy. Before punk Icelandic music was dull and sterile. In the Sixties rock’n'roll bands mimicked the Beatles and in the Seventies Pink Floyd. The only interesting pre-punk musician is a songwriter called Megas who is always drunk but very witty. He’s written songs about child molestation. In the Eighties there was an explosion of talent.
Roses a lounge that stays open till 5 am
New York Times – Dec 10, 2006
Later cross the Spree River into the borough of Kreuzberg the former punk quarter and Turkish enclave that is experiencing a Williamsburg-style revival. The bars and clubs along ranienstrasse offer something for everyone. For rollicking music strut to S036 and hear live bands like Napalm Death (No. 190; 49-30-414-013-06;… Alternately for some East Village flair make a beeline for the Sunday flea market at Boxhagener Platz. It’s crammed with funky T-shirts vintage Kraftwerk vinyl plastic housewares and plenty of genuine junk. Don’t forget your camera: the crowd trends toward purple-dyed punks nose-pierced vamps dreadlocked crusties and everyone’s favorite aging hippies. In other words it’s the 80s all over again but with even more kitsch. The BasicsContinental Airlines flies nonstop to Berlin from Newark and Delta flies nonstop from Kennedy. Flights start at about $400 this month and take about eight hours on the outbound leg. Berlin’s tiny Tegel airport is five miles from the city center.
Nobody likes us we care
Guardian Unlimited – Dec 10, 2006
When MM reviewed My Chemical Romance’s third album Welcome to the Black Parade (WEA) in ctober it was dismissed as a piece of “stadium schmaltz” and awarded one star. Never mind that it went to number two and the title track hit number one in the singles chart; our inbox was filled the following week with letters of complaint. Twelve-year-old Clare Davis insisted that “My Chemical Romance’s music is about passion emotions and letting your feelings out. If your writer doesn’t feel these emotions honestly he shouldn’t be reviewing any music – especially passionate rock music. “Sixteen-year-old Stacey Martin wrote to say she was “gutted and let’s say pretty damn annoyed”. “There are so many people out there like me who love MCR and all their hard work” she continued. “The same people who go to all their gigs and in some cases owe their lives to MCR’s music… It figures that Gerard Way used to be a comic book illustrator; his songs are highly dramatic and connect with a very adolescent intensity of feeling. In interviews he has discussed his battles with depression but he also exudes a very Americanpositivity. He despises the term ‘emo’ which was first used to describe ‘emotional hardcore’ post-punk bands of the mid-Eighties like Fugazi. What of the Mail’s claim that “emos exchange competitive messages on their teenage websites about the scars on their wrists and how best to display them”? The statistics are undeniably alarming: more than 24000 teenagers are admitted to hospital in the UK each year after deliberately harming themselves (the most up-to-date figures are from 2003) according to research by the Samaritans and xford University. Girls are four times more likely to do so than boys. But any casual link between self-harm and emo is surely sensationalist. The Mail article written by Sarah Sands is full of strange claims anyway (that emo kids ride Vespa scooters for instance) prompting Gerard to call it the most “ignorant ridiculous thing we’ve ever read.