Jul 24, 2013 |
“Things have changed,” said Felipe Altenfelder as we pulled out of the airport carpark. “You’ll notice some differences.”
I’d arrived in São Paulo to start work on a documentary film about Fora do Eixo – the network of independent music collectives I’d become fascinated with over the past few years. This is a group of mostly young people spread around this continent-sized country, who have organised their own separate economy – putting on festivals, distributing records through live gigs, and using principles of solidarity economy, communal living and political activism in order to make independent music sustainable.
For someone like me, this is fascinating stuff.
“We’re still doing the music, of course…”
That’s a relief. I’d just flown for 11 hours and spent thousands of someone else’s pounds on getting this far.
“It’s just that now we’re quite busy with the revolution.”
He said this so matter-of-factly, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. Turns out I had. They are quite busy with the revolution.
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Dec 29, 2011 |
The New York Times says that 2011 was the year when rock just spun its wheels. The Guardian calls it the year of boring music.
And while “beige against the machine” is a cute and retweetable one-liner, it’s nothing more than a cheap shot based on a faulty premise: that something went wrong with music in 2011. That musicians gave up en-masse and just made safe, ineffectual and dull music.
There are quite a few problems with that idea. I’m just going to mention just three here, but you’ll no doubt think of your own too.
1) You can’t complain about a dull year in music if all you do is report on the pile of CDs that ended up on your desk as a result of public relations and major label marketing. If you were looking for urgency, relevance and innovation in that lot, you’ve misunderstood the process. No matter how much you shout “Challenge me!” at your stereo, it’s not going to oblige if you keep putting Coldplay CDs in it.
2) Even if you are looking outside the pile, chances are you’re still looking in the wrong places. Things that sound like (or aspire to sound like) the music that did make it to the minor landfill of compact discs cluttering your desk are not likely to be any better. After all, it’s no longer the job of rock music to be urgent or important. And it’s certainly not the job of mainstream rock music. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but guitar, bass, drums and vocals is no longer by default a counter-cultural lineup. The same can be said for R&B and mainstream hip hop. It’s possible to do radical stuff in those musical domains, but it’s certainly not the norm.
3) IF IT’S BORING, DO NOT WRITE ABOUT IT. In fact, write that on a post-it note and stick it to your laptop screen. Writing about boring is contributing to the boring.
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Jun 8, 2010 |
I want to make a very simple point. Almost too simple for a blog post. But it won’t fit into 140 characters, so it’s too long for Twitter, and I don’t know what proportion of my friends on Facebook would care about this – so it’s here for whoever’s interested.
Katy Bairstow wrote a thoughtful blog post about the distinction between journalists and reporters. I’d like to draw a similar distinction between critics and reviewers.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and there’s more to say than will even fit into a blog post (don’t get me started on tastemakers as critics, or literary criticism applied to popular music lyrics – we’ll be here all night) – but there’s a fairly simple general point to be made.
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Mar 17, 2010 |
Photo by mfophotos
Without wanting to tread on the toes of any of my colleagues – notably Paul Bradshaw, who is a world-beating expert on all things online journalism – I had a thought today about the crossover between newspapers and the internet.
Don’t think of this so much as an “idea” like the other ideas I’ve had so far. Think of this more like a thought experiment, and an invitation to have a conversation in the comments.
Personally, for what it’s worth, I believe the idea of a blanket paywall for online news content is a huge mistake, because I think it misunderstands the internet, media consumption in general – and specifically, the different ways that people use newspapers and news content.
And I think that if you do consider some of the ways in which newspapers are consumed, a slightly different possible approach to the monetisation and development of newspapers in the digital age starts to reveal itself… and I don’t think anyone’s thought of it yet.
Though it’s entirely possible that they have, but not told me about it.
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