Fiona Brice asks Is Your Music Organic?.
Are you listening to an artist or a band performing a song that they wrote themselves (I’d call that organic), or are you listening to a pop tune co-written by a conglomerate of industrial co-writers and performed by some battery hens in heels, or a genetically modified beast (see ‘Jedward’)? What are your children listening to?
If you are one of the large percentage of people approaching middle age whose music taste stagnated after they got married and put the Ikea CD shelving up, and whose only exposure to music is now via the XFactor or a few minutes of BBC radio, then it might be time to think about exploring some alternative choices
When comparing fans of independent music with foodies, there are a lot of amusing parallels, and she does make some good points. Who of us doesn’t know a few of the Ikea shelving people she refers to? But taking the food analogy to it’s logical conclusion, if Simon Cowell is Burger King, a lot of awful indie bands are closer to that dodgy late night takeaway with a freezer full of alsatian carcasses than a reputable organic restaurant.
It is, of course, very tongue-in-cheek, a sort of parody of Nigella Lawson doing music writing, rather than a Samantha Brick style lack of self-awareness. But the humour was clearly lost on far too many of Twitter’s indie hipsters, who were so up themselves they didn’t realised they’ve been Poe’d.
There’s certainly no excuse for the level of vitriol we saw on Twitter, which went from arch sneering at Brice’s mention of Queen (that one actually came from an indie singer-songwriter too) to what looked like an actual death threat. Not surprising that the author shut down her Twitter account.
Now, where did I put that Muse album?