We live in a post-genre world, maybe

Peter Robinson's bit in yesterday's Guardian suggesting we live in a world where genres are meaningless was in interesting read:

Last summer, a survey by “millennial insight agency” Ypulse surveyed 1,000 young adults. When asked about their favourite artists, many respondents couldn’t answer, not through ambivalence but because, it was concluded, “this generation is interested in so many music genres and artists”.

It found that while millennials are passionate about music (76% within the 13- to 17-year-old bracket said they wouldn’t be able to last a week without it), 79% of 13- to 32-year-olds said their tastes didn’t fall into one specific music genre. Just 11% said that they only listened to one genre of music. “It seems,” Ypulse noted when it published its findings, “that millennials are a genre-less generation”.

Maybe.

And you can see what he's getting at - people are less hung up on a pop/indie/urban distinction around what they're listening to. And, in part, that's down to the ease of discovery and consumption:

Samuel Potts, Columbia Records’ head of radio, puts YouTube at the heart of this. “Millennials or ‘digital natives’ are the first generation to literally have the entirety of the world’s music at their fingertips,” he reasons. “This influences the creators but also young fans in terms of taste. Online culture is inherently global, so genres that were distinct and contained to geographical locations are now cross-pollinated throughout the world. As a result, you get artists like 19-year-old Raury, who’s championed by the likes of Kanye and André 3000, and cites everyone from Bon Iver to Phil Collins as an influence.”

You can actually see the point where this starts to unravel - the idea that we're "cross-pollinating across the world" by bringing together Phil Collins and Kanye West. They literally mark the extremes of the entire global history of music.

What the article is really about is the less eyecatching suggestion that the mainstream has got a bit wider and a bit less regimented:

Even on The X Factor, acts were increasingly praised for their authenticity and their credibility; in auditions, songs by the likes of Kings Of Leon replaced Westlife’s Flying Without Wings.

This does require you to have believed that The Kings Of Leon were that much more credible than Westlife to begin with. And, sure, you might hear Sex On Fire on the X Factor, but that's about as far as it goes.
Perhaps if someone does Mauritia Mayer as their blind audition on The Voice, or Simbinbino gets covered by The 1975, maybe then we'll talk.

Because if we really were in this post-genre world, the news about Adele headlining Glastonbury wouldn't have had such a violently negative reaction.

Bookmarks: Chvrches

I'm pleased that I've lived long enough to see Clive James write about Chrvches, but I'm delighted that he lived long enough to write about them:

Young pop stars now are born knowing how the web drives the cashflow. That, apparently, is why Chvrches spell their name with a “v” instead of a “u”: when you Google them, you won’t get anyone else. Originally they were two ordinary-looking young blokes, but they were lucky enough to be joined by an extraordinary-looking young lady who could sing. Lauren Mayberry has an enchanting voice with a face to fit, and millions of hormonally tormented young men all over the world think there has never been anything like her, while millions of envious young women think that this must be history’s first case of a rebel angel dressed as if she didn’t give a damn.

Robert Forster: Streaming Now

The new Robert Forster album, Songs To Play, is streaming over on The Guardian website right now.

Mark Kozelek: Don't mess with Laura Snapes

Mark Kozelek has, sadly, form for coming across like a boor, and he's not learning from his mistakes. This week, he turned his creepy ire on Laura Snapes, who had the temerity to talk to people about him:

Last Monday (1 June), Sun Kil Moon played at the Barbican in London. During the encore, Kozelek introduced a snippet of a new song he had apparently been writing. I wasn’t there, but a friend/colleague was, and phoned me after the gig. I’ve since heard the audio and it made me feel sick. “There’s this girl named Laura Snapes, she’s a journalist. She’s out to do a story on me, has been contacting a lot of people that know me,” he told the sold-out, 1,900-capacity room. Then he started repeating the line: “Laura Snapes totally wants to fuck me / get in line, bitch … Laura Snapes totally wants to have my babies.” The audience clapped and cheered. He played another song, then said he’d only been kidding around before: I was “cute”, “sweet”, “a good kid”. “She’s written some nice things about me.” Then he sang it a few more times before chiding himself. “Better stop before I make Pitchfork headlines for myself again.”

There is, of course, no line of people wanting to have sex with Mark Kozelek, apart from in his head. Kozelek is just an asshat. Snapes would be justified in throwing something heavy at his head; instead, she marvellously takes him down using his own work:

Kozelek trades in sucker-punches. He impugns online “bitching and whining”, but hides behind one-way email exchanges, balks at the idea of his peers speaking about him and issues tirades (and sometimes, sexual advances) from the cowardly remove of the stage, with the get-out clause that it’s a performance. He can use sexually violent language to reduce female critics to the status of groupies, knowing that while male musicians’ misogynist acts are examined for nuance and defended as traits of “difficult” artists, women and those who call them out are treated as hysterics who don’t understand art. “The world don’t owe us shit, I learned that real fuckin’ young,” he sings on Universal Themes’ Little Rascals. If anything remains to separate Kozelek from his work, it’s that his music preaches that the least we owe one another is decency.

A letter to The Guardian, illustrated

Catatonia, 1999:

Storm the palace

You can stick you obe
I'll sort out your bad Feng Shui
'Cos tourism is congestion
Tourism is congestion

Cerys Matthews, 2014:

"Sorry, did I say stick you OBE? I meant stick your MBE on my lapel. And I literally meant I'd sort out your bad feng shui - I've moved your animal statues into the money corners of the palace. Which is all of them. And now we can talk about a ticketing system to ease the congestion of tourism..."

Inspired by this letter from yesterday's Guardian:

Lovely photo of Cerys Matthews receiving her award at Buckingham Palace (Medal citizen, 22 November.) Would this be the same palace which we were urged to storm in the song on Catatonia’s album Equally Cursed and Blessed, the lyrics of which included the line “You can stick your OBE”?
Jim Naylon
Stonesfield, Oxfordshire

Dexys: You heard it here first

From the print edition of The Guardian's review of Geno Washington:

As Dexys’ Kevin Rowland told the Guardian recently, it was seeing Geno Washington perform “in 1968 in a sweaty club” that made him want to become a singer.

Luckily, in the online version, it's clearer that the paper realise that 'Rowland saw Washington in 68 at a club' isn't quite the scoop they make it sound in print:

As Dexys’ Kevin Rowland told the Guardian recently, it was seeing Geno Washington perform “in 1968 in a sweaty club” that made him want to become a singer, and inspired the band’s 1980 smash hit, Geno.

I do not recognise this song. Please turn it off.

There was an interesting piece in yesterday's G2 about how the Co-op tried playing unsigned music in its stores, and lasted 24 hours before bailing:

The supermarket was piloting a new system to “help emerging artists promote and monetise their music” by playing only unsigned acts from licensing company Emerge on Co-operative Radio (the fact that it is about 50% cheaper to profile unsigned artists than mainstream ones may have been an incentive, too). Unfortunately staff weren’t thrilled about the chance to explore new music at work. One angry Facebook campaign later, and the supermarket chain returned to playing its regular, pricier chart music.

You've got to feel for the Co-Op. They really can't catch a break at the moment. When they're not putting a drug-quaffing amateur in charge of the bank, they're facing Facebook backlashes for promoting unknown singer-songwriters over the baked beans.

Although, it turns out, we might have to take the side of outraged customers here. The Guardian's Harriet Gibsone visited Sports Direct - where Emerge are still in charge of the music - to find out what the experience was like.

A few minutes into one particularly epic track – think the Killers fronted by X Factor’s Jamie Afro – I sidle up to an unsuspecting member of staff to ask who is playing.

I'm thinking of an act like that, and it is making me feel so queasy I'm starting to wish I had the need of anything Sports Direct sells just so in order I could buy it elsewhere in protest.

But this is unfair. That's just one song, one act. What, Harriet, beside Killerkaraoke, did you hear?

one breezy little song by a band I’m touting as the German Sugar Ray

I see.

Midway through a song by a group I’m calling “Nickelback for the Tinder generation”

Swipe. Swipe, dammit. SWIPE.

a pop track by a guy I’ll call Darius 2.0

Oh, the humanity. It seems the good shoppers of the Co-Op have been unfairly traduced. They weren't music haters, reacting violently at the opportunity to hear something new. They were music lovers, trying to save themselves from a service which appears to be dedicated to uncovering artists who are clearly unsigned for a bloody good reason.

In case you missed it...

Here's all of yesterday's famous-ish musicians writing about the deaths of more famous musicians in the Guardian boiled down:

Chas Spod on Superbly Fabulous:
I heard about Superbly's death on the news, although I was watching the news someplace incredible, like I was about to get on a flight to Marbella or possibly holed up in a hotel in Slough. I couldn't believe they'd died. I'd always thought that we'd have wound up working together, probably to the point where the pupil would have become the master. Their music is still available to listen to and hasn't changed since they died, really.

Bookmarks: Kathleen Hanna

You might have enjoyed Everett True's interview with Kathleen Hanna in the Guardian last week; today he's posted the original transcript to Collapse Board:

When I was 13 me and my best friend Angela Cheever were out on a Friday night, hanging out at video arcades, playing Ms. Pac Man, flirting with boys from our school etc…While walking from this place called ‘Pins and Cues’ to ‘Jerry’s Sub Shop’ I noticed a man was following us. We were near the road but there were no cars and when I told Angie about the man we both started walking really fast and so did he, and then we ran and he started chasing us. Nothing was open but we saw a light on at a funeral home so we ran up the stairs and started pounding on the doors screaming. No one came, but the guy freaked out and backed off. I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if we didn’t run and he would’ve caught up with us.

From puberty on, I felt like me and my friends were always running. From abusive Dads, men on the streets, or even running away from mean things people would say to us that got stuck in our heads. But running meant we thought we were worth saving. That’s why the record is called Run Fast.

Alanis Morissette isn't that ironic

The Guardian asks Alanis Morissette how she feels being at the heart of comedy 'some of the things in Ironic aren't actually irony' trope:

I wouldn't say [I'm] bored, I would say interested because I love to get to the underbelly of why things bug people so much. People must be very at odds with the idea of being profoundly stupid. I mean, malapropisms; big fucking deal. It's kind of like in traffic when you're yelling at someone for cutting you off and you're cutting someone off too.

Hang about, Alanis, that sounds like one of those things in the song that you describe as ironic but isn't... I fear you might be making the world collapse in on itself.

Bookmarks: Glastonbury 2012

The Guardian is currently streaming live from the site of the Glastonbury festival. Yes, you read that correctly.

Bookmarks: LaRoux

In The Guardian, Matthew Horton wonders what the synth-pop class of 2009 has in store:

La Roux's route looks darker. Her first album plumped for rinky-dink early Depeche Mode – an innocent pursuit on the face of it, but grim passions lurk beneath. Three years is plenty for Jackson to gain a taste for leather perv-breeks and clanking S&M pop, but she might want to pause for thought before diving headlong into smack addiction and pretending to be Trent Reznor.

Takedown demands suggests RIAA isn't particularly concerned with detail

TorrentFreak has been wading through some of the requests that copyright holders have made for Google to delist content under the DCMA.

It suggests that perhaps most of the copyright firms have employed a Hulk like "Smash! Smash!" approach to their work:

[T]he RIAA asked Google to delist a review of the album Own The Night published on The Guardian. The artist behind the album is Lady Antebellum, signed to RIAA-member Capitol Records.

Even more worrying, the RIAA asked Google to delist Last.fm’s entire Electro Pop section because they thought it carried a pirate copy of All About Tonight by Pixie Lott.

Warner also reappeared later on, asking Google to delist a page on news site NME which lists information on the latest movies, which at the time included information on the movie Hall Pass. The same page on NME was targeted on several other occasions, including by anti-piracy company DtecNet on behalf of Lionsgate, who had info on The Hunger Games delisted.

Maybe it's unfair to charcterise the RIAA as simply throwing their weight around like a confused bear suddenly trapped in a camper van. Perhaps they really did fear that the Guardian review might have contained enough information to effectively allow people to know what the record sounded like by imagining it.

Or perhaps they're a business who won't and can't adapt to the 21st century.

Blur: No distance left to run (well, a little bit)

John Harris catches up with Damon Albarn for the Guardian, and discovers that we might just about be at the end of the Blur reunion period:

So no more Blur records?

"No, I don't think so."

And will you play live again after Hyde Park?

"No, not really."

This is even bigger news. So that's it?

"I think so, yeah," he says. A little later, he goes on: "And I hope that's the truth: that that's how we end it. I don't know: you can write scripts, and they always end up going… [pause]… well, one thing I've learned, and I'm sure you're exactly the same, is that everything I think I've got totally sorted out, and I know exactly what's going to happen – it never works out that way…"

So how should I put it? That in all likelihood, this is the end of Blur?

"In all likelihood, I would say. [pause] Oh, God…"

This isn't a very clean declaration of an ending - it's a 'ooh, footsteps going near the waterfall'-cum-'well, we never saw the body fall into the canal' conclusion, with a door clearly left open. Albarn is too shrewd - perhaps too realistic - to say 'never again'.

Harris is also very, very good at getting Albarn to talk about drugs, and in particular the extent to which 13 is Blur's smack album. John's honest enough to admit that there's a massive spoon of hindsight to his insight:

But even though Frischmann's drug problems were becoming well known, nobody who wrote about Blur – myself included – seemed to cotton on (much like, perhaps, when Britain averted its eyes from the fact that YMCA by the Village People was a joyous hymn to the gay lifestyle).

Read the full piece, though, it's an excellent interview in a lovely piece of writing - and it explains why Albarn is now friends with Noel Gallagher, but less so with Jamie Hewlett/

Bookmarks: Brits 2012

Peter Robinson looks forward to tonight's event:

A win for Kasabian prompts the TV voiceover artiste to make some sort of reference to the resurgence of guitar music, conflating guitar music with authenticity along the way.

Gordon in the morning: The Booker surprise

I'm sure it's just a coincidence, and given the rising tensions between "News" International and the Guardian Media Group the long-lens pap snap of a Guardian columnist on Gordon's pages this morning isn't some sort of attempt at revenge.

I'm sure Gordon thinks he's just invading the privacy of Konnie Huq, and the fact that Charlie Brooker is also violated at the same time is just - what would the phrase be? - collateral asshattery.

Alex James: The big cheese is rotting

The Guardian's Lost In Showbiz returns to the flop of Alex James' cheese festival, which has gone bankrupt. And guess who's left out of pocket?

Erm, the local school. Marina Hyde explains:

But perhaps our greatest sympathy should be reserved for the local school, Kingham primary. The school organises its own annual music festival, and was asked to use its contacts to book performers for the Friday night at Harvest. It duly provided seven bands. (How quaint that the acts at Alex James's festival were being provided by the local primary. Does he not have a contacts book of his own?)

The school now feels unable to comment, but a couple of weeks ago, headteacher Ed Read told the Cotswold Journal that it was owed £7,000 for the entertainment it organised.

It's hard to believe that the idea of mixing music and cheese could produce a terrible festival. Perhaps it was the type of people the event attracted kept away larger numbers of punters?

Helpfully, Marina has a photo of the types who did show up:

Yes, that's a photo of Clarkson and David Cameron, enjoying themselves at the expense of a state school. An ordinary day for Dave, in other words.

Just when you think Alex James can't sink any lower:

He has also made several appearances to promote his Alex James Presents line of cheese at Asda. "It's generated something like £2m worth of publicity," he trilled recently. "It even made the New York Times! But I suppose that's what I set out to do."

Ah, hooking up with the not-entirely-cuddly WalMart organisation. Because we know what a great friend of the organic, local food movement WalMart are.

Photographerobit: Robert Whitaker

Roger Whitaker, who photographed the Beatles during their final tour, has died of cancer. The Guardian has a full obituary today.

Perhaps his most-famed Beatles-era work was this cover:

Leona Lewis comments on current events

Talking to The Guardian Guide, Leona Lewis struggled to explain the riots.

Fair enough: it's going to be quite a while before anyone will actually really understand the causes of the riots, and by then the world will have moved on and will be rioting elsewhere, for different reasons. So perhaps it's a bit much to expect Leona to have something coherent to offer.

"It was just hoodrats getting totally out of control," she froths, with an indignant swish of her newly dark, single-plaited hair. "I don't think there was any motivation behind it other than to cause trouble cos they're bored and want free stuff. Total, total hoodrats. Little shits!"

If we take this as a thought-through position, doesn't Leona think that 'boredom' is a motivation of itself? And that 'boredom' has its own causes and impulses?

And, given that Lewis is effectively trilling Cameron's "criminality pure and simple" line, albeit while wearing slightly nicer underwear, surely there's a question why these pure, simple criminals acted out on those three or four days last month, and not at any time before or since? Didn't something cause those "hoodrats" to suddenly swarm like hoodrats over branches of 3?

"I don't care how poor you are," she scoffs, "there's no excuse for setting fire to people's property. I was, 'This is our community and you're setting fire to your neighbour's house? You could kill someone!' They weren't even thinking about it."

That's true; there wasn't a lot of analytical thinking going on. And, indeed, there won't be any if Lewis has anything to do with it, not while people confuse 'understanding the causes' with 'making excuses for'.

"My dad was saying, 'It's been a long time coming,'" she notes. "He was, 'We have so many laws and regulations against us that we can't discipline the kids. There is no discipline.' It's a lack of discipline and respect. Yeah, some were opportunists just taking stuff but the ones setting light to stuff? When I was young there were always troublemakers but it's changed so much."

I've tried to pick this apart to work out what Lewis actually means here - is she saying that the looters had understandable motivations if they weren't also arsonists? Or just the opportunist looters? How does an opportunist looter differ from a hoodrat?

The suggestion that troublemakers have got out of hand is fascinating, given what Lewis is in the paper to promote:

Most intriguingly, there's the stunning trip-hop of Trouble ("It's very London,"), as if Kate Bush in 1979 was transported through a pop Tardis to front Massive Attack in 1991. Her spectral vocal imploring "I'm a whole lot of trouble."

"It's definitely true," she smiles. "I am a whole lot of trouble."

So, presumably, in Lewis' moral kingdom, troublemaking is a finely-graded thing - some troublemaking is fine; some, even desirable. But there's a point at which troublemaking turns into hoodratting, and then it becomes a thing that's bad.

But let's just turn back to her views on a lack of respect. Leona Lewis owes her fame to a television programme whose premise is inviting people to come and have a go at achieving fame and fortune without the need to demonstrate much in the way of talent or work to achieve that end, and which, especially in its early stages, consists of very rich people sitting in judgement on the have-nots, alternating between pissing on their dreams and deriding their deficiencies. Perhaps Lewis doesn't want to look too closely at the culture that has rioted, because it might be close to home in ways that aren't solely geographic?

Glastonbuy 2011: Press round-up

The miserable weather made it hard for press photographers to find much to celebrate on site yesterday, so Gordon Smart in The Sun is reduced to running a blurry photo of Professor Green with a cardboard cup of beer:

The rapper - who is headlining the East Dance Tent tonight - intends to make the most of every minute at the festival.

He does, eh?

"But if it rains, I'm just going to stay in the Winnebago, drink rum, play cards and watch it all on TV."

Ah, yes. The classic festival experience of sitting in a caravan playing canasta.

Still, the Winnebago will at least help with time on site, right?

He said: "I've got on it on Thursday, then off Friday, then on it Saturday and on it again on Sunday."

Oh. So he's making the most of every moment, except Friday. Also, that suggests that although Gordon posted this today, and claimed he'd had the conversation with Green yesterday, he couldn't possibly have done. Is the photo really worth smudging the chronology?

The Mail has a tiresome report from "a middle-aged, middle-class mother". Yes, it runs through every bloody Glasto cliche you can think of:

The final tipping point? My wellington boot has literally been sucked off my foot by sticky mud, leaving me in my socks and up to my ankles in gelatinous brown goo.

Julie Lawrence is the Mail's woman crying "in the Portaloos" (did the Mail's legal team not get the regular missive from Portakabin insisting that their trademark not be used as a generic?).

It turns out she's not even a Glastonbury virgin:

Back then, still in my 20s, during the infamous mud bath of 1997, I laughed and trudged along with the best of them. Forget the mud and yucky toilets — sprirituality and music was what it was really all about, wasn’t it?

But now - why, she thinks she must have been as mad as Melanie Philips to enjoy it at all:

I want to shout: ‘Come on, ladies, what are we doing here in our dotage? This is NOT FUN!’ My back is protesting and every ounce of my being is screaming for a sit-down, a nice cup of tea and slice of fruit cake. What do these other middle-class mums have that I do not? Have I grown old before my time?

What do the other people there have that you don't? How about 'a genuine reason for being there other than filing an article that could have been knocked together in a Costa Coffee on Temple Meads station', Julie.

In the Mail tomorrow: Someone who doesn't really like tennis goes to Wimbledon and whines about how it's full of tennis.

The Express, meanwhile, builds its coverage around the cultural highlight of the day:

WAYNE Rooney and his wife Coleen waded into the mud of Glastonbury yesterday in wellies.

Hats off to the inept Express web operation, by the way, which still isn't convinced the U2 gig will happen:

Last night U2 were due to play a long-awaited headline gig at the event, attended by 170,000 revellers.

But, obviously, we won't find out if that happened until the Sunday Express goes to print.

In another part of the Richard Desmond empire - the only-slightly-porny part - the Daily Star is also fixated on Wayne and Colleen, but puts its sister title to shame by doing some Actual Journalism about their arrival:

A guard said: “Wayne seemed in good spirits even though he and Coleen had already got soaked.”

See? It's not a real story unless you talk to an eyewitness.

The Mirror seems to be struggling to make sense of it all:

IT seems Chipmunk’s dietary requirements at Glastonbury were no problem at all. After bringing the house down opening The Other Stage, he tweeted: “GLASTO was HAAAAM!!!!”

And cheese, I hope.

Sarah Tetteh got a byline for that.

The Telegraph had a secret weapon for the U2 set. Their man, Neil McCormick, knows Bono. Yes, he seldom mentions it, so it might be a bit of a surprise to discover that. But this once, he was prepared to use his connections:

Backstage insight from Neil McCormick:

Twitter: Nice to watch Bono signalling & encouraging band from behind the stage. They've got a sneaky keyboard player round back too.

Twitter: Road crew, gtr techs all on their toes for this one, problem solving, shouting at one another. Looks seamless out front. #U2 #glasto

It's not entirely clear how Neil could have been delivering "backstage insight" while also able to explain how it looked from the front.

I'll return to the Telegraph's coverage in a separate post, by the way.

The Guardian wryly reports a flop in the fields:

Mobile phone company, and Glastonbury music partner, Orange, had a cunning ruse to get punters interested in its wares. It sent a 6ft 8in "appy man" to Glastonbury to roam around the site. Festival-goers were challenged to find this man, with the prize potentially being tickets to the side of the Pyramid stage. Clues as to appy man's location were to be posted "on the official Glasto App and via Twitter", Orange wrote.

Alas, the punters the Guardian spoke to were unaware of appy man's existence, let alone whereabouts. This reporter did find appy man, mostly because his PR man was loudly alerting passersby to his presence.

A quick look at the @appy_man twitter feed revealed 500 people had signed up for clues as to his location – or 0.25% of expected Glastonbury attendees.

The idea that people have better things to do at Glastonbury is heartwarming.

Although the presence of a mobile phone company as "music partner" really does look odd given all those claims about Glastonbury isn't sponsored...