Music Opinion Blog

Opinions and occasional rants about the state of the music scene. The views expressed are entirely my own, and do not represent those of any artists or publications with whom I may be connected.

David Bowie

Posted on January 11, 2016 by Tim Hall

All day my social media feeds have been pretty much nothing but tributes to David Bowie, who died just four days after releasing his final album.

You know you have a seriously doughnut-shaped record collection when one of the giants of 20th and 21st century music passes on and you realised don’t own a single one of their records. But his biggest hits were still stuck in my head this morning, “Life on Mars”, “Space Oddity”, “Starman”, “Heroes”. His standards are part of the air we breathe. And his artistic legacy is woven into the DNA of just about every genre of popular music that came after him. To quote Matt Stevens, he’s in the same league as Miles Davis and The Beatles.

Like Lemmy, David Bowie was a one-off who did it his way without following trends. One thing that made him unique was they way he stood outside and above narrow musical tribes; he simultaneously belonged to nobody and to everybody. He combined both ground-breaking style and genuine musical substance in a way unmatched by anyone else. He left whole genres in his wake; artists who based their entire sound around just one period in his ever-changing output after Bowie himself had moved on to something else. He also had great taste in musicians to act as a foil. Just look at the guitarists he worked with over the years; Mick Ronson, Robert Fripp, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Nile Rogers, Earl Slick.

Even though I’ve never been a hardcore fan, it’s difficult to imagine popular music without him. So enough of those who would police other people’s grief, whether it’s a snobbish disdain or some elitist claim of exclusive ownership as a “true fan”. It’s one of those times when if you have nothing positive to say, it’s better saying nothing. Music clearly never touched some people’s souls, even if when some of them started their writing careers supposedly as a music critics. Can’t they even sit on their self-righteous thinkpieces for a couple of days?

David Bowie was one of the true greats, whose work had a huge impact on music and on wider culture. Let us celebrate and remember that.

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Black Metal goes Graham Kendrick

Posted on January 9, 2016 by Tim Hall

With very few lyric changes, this would work as a Christian worship song. In fact, somebody should do it. It would mess with a lot of minds.

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Think metal is dead? That’s your fault

Posted on January 8, 2016 by Tim Hall

There’s a hard-hitting if somewhat sweary editorial in Metal Hammer about the conservatism of some metal fans. Those people who refuse to accept that generations of bands since they came of age are actually producing great music, even if it doesn’t sound exactly like their favourite band when they were 17.

On the Metal Hammer website we cover pretty much everything considered metal – from Babymetal to Burzum – but 90% of the time the younger bands are being slaughtered in the comments section for daring to have a haircut not approved by the High Priests Of Metaldom or for not recreating Rust In Peace. The bastards. Like, how dare a band in 2016 have the tenacity, no the ignorance, to sound like something other than Megadeth?

It’s pointed out in the comments that the loud people on the internet may well be an unrepresentative and self-selecting sample, but there’s no denying that these people exist, and there are plenty of them. And not just in metal either; the prog world is full of them. It’s why so many 70s bands can play to full houses trotting out the same dreary old greatest hits set that they’ve been playing for the past twenty years while vastly better bands play to a few dozen. Great bands get dismissed as “Not proper Prog” because they don’t sound exactly like Pendragon.

People like this are one reason why so many festivals, from the huge Download to the far smaller Cambridge Rock Festival frequently end up with such conservative lineups, with acts who are well past their prime topping the bill. Meanwhile far better bands who might excel if given the chance of a headline spot themselves go on at 3pm.  Why, for example, have Nightwish never headlined a major festival in Britain?

It’s got to the point where you can tell exactly which age group the biggest proportion of attendees of any given festival fall into by whoever is headlining.

Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis thing, when you’re young enough to think everything still revolves around your generation but not quite old and wise enough to have reaslised that actually it doesn’t. But once you get past the wrong side of 50 is starts to get a lot harder to pretend that the heroes from your youth are still as good live those a generation younger. Sure, at a big festival or an arena gig they can still make a big spectacle with large-scale production values denied to “lesser” bands. But in smaller venues there’s nowhere to hide, and there’s been more than one occasion when I’ve seen a younger and hungrier support band completely blow some old-stagers away.

Anyway, go and read that Metal Hammer piece. And take a look at yourself and think about whether you are part of the problem.

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What was the last album you bought from an artist that was new to you, purely on the basis of a personal recommendation, without having heard it first?  Leave your answers in the comments.

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Tim Hall | 14 Comments

Now they’ve discovered four new elements and filled the seventh row of the Periodic Table, two of them ought to be called Iommium and Lemmium. Because they are all both heavy and metal.

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Is this the end of Readers Recommend?

Posted on December 31, 2015 by Tim Hall

Sad news that, barring a last-minute reprieve, The Guardian is calling time on the weekly Readers’ Recommend column.

For those not familiar with it, every Thursday evening the Guardian website puts up a post containing the week’s subject, for example “Songs about mountains“, and readers are asked to nominate songs in the comment section. It will always run to several hundred comments. The “Guru” of the week must read all the comments, listen to as many of the nominated songs as possible and assemble a playlist which will be published the following week.

It has been running for a decade now.

For the early years the Guru was one of The Guardian’s own writers, beginning with Dorian Lynskey who frustratingly never chose any of the songs I nominated. More recently there have been rotating volunteer Gurus selected from the community itself under the stewardship of Peter Kimpton, and that appears to have given the whole thing a new lease of life. It’s certainly drawn me back in and I’ve seen significantly more of my nominations make the playlist, including Panic Room and Mostly Autumn songs.

It’s spawned a remarkable and unique sub-community within The Guardian’s site. I cannot think of any other long-lasting music community that hasn’t been based around a shared love of particular band or genre; the tastes of the RR community is all over the map, and that is its greatest strength. It has one and only one cardinal rule, “thou shalt not rubbish anyone else’s taste“.

I have no idea why The Guardian have decided to pull the plug. It’s may be that The Guardian just don’t know quite what to do with something that’s a bit of an outlier compared to the rest of the site. Perhaps we don’t fit the 25-45 age group demographic that Guardian Music wants to target. Perhaps they just don’t like something they can’t gatekeep? Look at the disgraceful way they arbitrarily disqualified things from the Readers’ Album of the Year poll because it was the wrong sort of music nominated by the wrong sort of fans. RR just doesn’t back the mid-life-crisis consensus groupthink of too many of the paper’s own writers, so it has to go.

It’s being suggested that Readers Recommend doesn’t fit because Guardian Music is more interested in celebrity lifestyle reporting than in expressing deep passion for actual music. If you look at their writer’s picks for their best articles of the year, what appears to be the top two are both awful clickbait thinkpieces about Taylor Swift and Kanye West which are all about identity politics with little to say about the actual music. I’m sure there is a place for that sort of thing, but not at the expense of actual music writing.

It’s a shame. Readers Recommend is something unique and special, and I hope the extended community survives in some form. As I’ve always said, online forums and social media platforms come and go, but what endures and what really matters is the relationships you make through them.

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It’s galling to see Lemmy being eulogised by publications that would never have given Motörhead the time of day during their prime. The irony is that Lemmy always represented everything they kept telling us rock’n'roll was supposed to be about.

Posted on December 30, 2015 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Music Journalism in an Age of Niches

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Tim Hall

The shenanigans over the Guardian end-of-year list are surely a sympton of far deeper problems. The internet-era music world is fragmented into myriad overlapping niche scenes, and it’s harder for one publication to cover it all. But to cover a small subset of niches and pretending it’s the “mainstream” doesn’t work. Because beyond the mass-market corporate pop of Adele and Coldplay there is no mainstream. It’s all niches.

The Guardian is full of former NME types who have grown accustomed to acting as gatekeepers and tastemakers. But it’s a different world now; what worked in 1995 isn’t going to fly in 2015. If a broadsheet wants to continue with in-depth music coverage and wants to continue to be relevant, it needs to reinvent itself.

To start with, they must engage with those niche scenes they had been pretending weren’t relevant, and ensure they have the writers, either staff or freelancers, who understand those scenes.  Only then can they genuinely have have the broad coverage of music they currently only claim to.

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Have The Guardian just rigged their readers’ poll?

Posted on December 23, 2015 by Tim Hall

Disgraceful behaviour by The Guardian for The best albums of 2015 – readers’ picks 

We are in accord! For the first time any of us can recall, Guardian readers and Guardian writers had the same two favourite albums of the year, in the same order. This year, in a rare moment of rigour, we decided to exclude obvious attempts to game the system – so, Tinker’s Mitten (“like a beefier Flying Pickets”, one reader suggested, enticingly), Jodie Marie and Karnataka, we’re sorry; but next time you suspect your admirers might be voting for you en masse in a poll, tell them not to all vote at the same time (we record exactly when each vote is cast, for exactly this reason). Had they only spread their votes out a little more, all might well have featured in our top five.

So The Guardian admit to rigging the ballot, and the results then just happen to validate the boring consensus picks of the paper’s own critics.

Sorry, Guardian, but this stinks to high heaven.

If you run a poll with a public ballot on the internet with a very low barrier to entry, you surrender your riight to gatekeep the results, and accept the risk that outsiders might come and gatecrash your party. This happened last year when veteran punk satirists Half Man Half Biscuit was voted readers’ album of the year. The general consensus at the time was “Good on them. Anyone else could have done the same”.

What’s different this year, aside from Karnataka not being sufficiently fashionable for the gatekeepers? Running a ballot, then changing the rules when you get a result you don”t like really is out of order.

The irony is that had they not excluded Jodie Marie and Karnataka, they wouldn’t have have ended up with an all-male top five.  So much for the diversity The Guardian prides itself in.

A couple of minutes Googling reveals that there is no such band as “Tinker’s Mitten”. This might be because The Guardian got their name wrong, or it might be that The Guardian got pranked with votes for a fake band.  But Karnataka and Jodie Marie are very real. Were they just accidental collateral damage?

At this point the best thing The Guardian can do is admit that they screwed up, and republish a top ten (not a top five) with both Karnataka and Jodie Marie reinstated.

Posted in Music Opinion | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

The good thing about reading individual’s end-of-year lists like Scott’s or Skin Back Alley’s is the way they highlight things you may have missed over the course of the year. It’s also why the aggregated lists by mainsteam publications are useless; all the quirky individual choices get squeezed out by the predictable consensus choices.

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Tim Hall | Comments Off