I suppose congratulations are in order to some of you readers. Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing In The Name” has been named the UK’s Christmas number one single, beating out X Factor winner Joe Mcthingy’s Miley Cyrus cover “The Climb” by some number of downloads. Or something. Well, woo bloody hoo. Have a metaphorical biscuit. It’s not that I don’t understand the impetus behind the whole Facebook campaign that started this whole escapade. I’m as…
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…
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…
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