Oooh, apologies for my completely unexplained absence from this organ last week. A variety of continuous, unlikely emergencies conspired to keep me away from my precious keyboard and monitor on Sunday, eventually culminating in an exciting race through Dublin to find a kind of precious anklet. Either that, or I was pathetically tired from working all week, and that anklet story was actually just an elaborate dream I had. I really don’t remember, and frankly,…
They say “familiarity breeds contempt”, but the more I hear that phrase, the more I dislike it. And not just because I’m a pathetic, desperate contrarian idiot – the phrase is wrong. Wrong. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. It breeds comfort, warmth, and eventually nostalgia. New things are awful, and potentially dangerous, and sometimes have questionable odours. Shun new things. Avoid them. Instead, you should wrap yourself in the comfortable blanket of the safe and familiar,…
You’ll forgive me if I wallow in a little self-indulgence this week – a new job and, more importantly, lethargy have prevented me from bothering to care about most music-related matters this week, outside of reminding myself quite how brilliant The Hold Steady truly are. If you don’t own any of their records, it’s important that you go buy one right now. In fact, buy all of them. They’re lovely. Two music matters that I…
People are stupid. Unendingly, gruesomely stupid, like a lobotomised, shaved badger – every last one of us a fetid, gormless lump of uselessness. I apologise for the crass generalisation there, but really, it needed to be said. And really, I should have said it in big bold letters: a collection of blithe, oblivious pixels, squatted thoughtlessly right there on your screen, taunting the entire laughable idea of your pointless existence. A person is just a…
So, apparently, the 16th MTV European Music Awards “went down” on Thursday. Did you notice? I didn’t – I was preoccupied with more relevant, pressing matters, like noticing that ooh, it’s getting quite cold this time of year, and hey, I need a shave. Of course, the fact that these two realisations came in quick succession meant that my addled brain became quite confused, and I ended up shaving my woolly fleece. Live and learn,…
Spending too much time thinking about anything in particular is dangerous. So dangerous, it should quite possibly be illegal. Giving any amount of extended thought to anything rarely leads to a good outcome. Imagine if Hitler hadn’t been allowed enough “thought-space” to write Mein Kampf – wouldn’t that be wonderful? Hitler’s awful, demented thought process, brutally cut off before it could develop into an insane quest for Lebensraum, all because of some ridiculously ill-formed notion…
Are you ready to feel like a piece of shit? Gordon Gano was 19 when the Violent Femmes recorded their self-titled debut album. True story: the trio borrowed $10,000 from bassist Brian Ritchie’s old man and ground out one of the great American rock albums of the 1980’s, and certainly one of the most unmistakable. Gano’s age shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering how (sometimes disturbingly) well Violent Femmes encapsulates the iconic rage and frustration…
Music: it’s entirely, utterly, completely, undeniably, irrefutably subjective, right? Wrong. You daft idiot. Look, I know it hurts, but it’s true. Some music is just objectively woeful. In fact, the odds are pretty high that if you’re listening to music right now, it’s crap. Whether it be chart music on the radio, an album on your iPod, or a memory on the tiny little Fisher Price turntable that is your mind, the song remains the…
When did music television die, exactly? I’ll tell you when – it was when we all gave up on it, and with a collective mouseclick accepted Youtube and Myspace as our appointed saviours. But! There’s a more pressing question on my mind: is there a single post-Myspace moment where we can say music television went beyond an existence of pallid, pathetic obsolescence, and into fully-fledged, crap-slinging horribleness? When I say “music television”, I don’t mean…
Soft rock really gets something of a raw deal these days. Mention in a conversation that you like soft rock (in an unironic way, rather than a “sings along to Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ after a couple of drinks at a wedding” way… c’mon, keep up) and you may as well have told that person that you’re partial to licking their grandmother – you’re now a social pariah, and you’d best get used to it….
Al Byrne
Tyler Sonic