Helen Nianias muses art, the student stereotype and our supposed intellectuality...
To choose the high life, the low life, or somewhere respectable in between? Helen Nianias pontificates.
Music blogs! The home of music and opinion on the internet - a global force for people's listening tastes and something we dip our toes into every Wednesday. This week it's the sublime and the ridiculous (although not necessarily in that order) with Pop Justice and Music Is Art.
Music! Blog! An very old word and a fairly new one. What happens when old meets new? Find out in our weekly look at two of the internet's receptacles for music and opinion.<br />
Ding-ding. First round. (Thank you Mis-Teeq). Radiozero is one of the best things to come out of Canada since nice people travelling round Asia with maple leaves on their backpacks, but it is far, far louder and much less likely to want to chill out or wander up a mountain. This blog is where remix-geniuses Tyler Fedchuk and Paul Devro release slightly erratic podcast mixes of the tunes they broadcast every Friday from Vancouver, including regular remixes of their own (which would probably be labelled EXCLUSIVE!!@! or WORLD PREMIERE!!! on over excitable UK commercial stations) under the names 1/2ALIVE or Boyznoise. The podcasts are an eclectic mix of everything that is new in electro and bouncy hip-hop along with older tunes made to sound like everything that is new in electro and bouncy hip-hop. ‘The Locomotion’ sliced up and served on a platter of house beats? The Beach Boys looped into oblivion yet somehow retaining its innate magic? Not a problem. Add in slivers of Crystal Castles, Diplo, Justice, Digitalism and the rest of the pioneers of the new wave of dance music and you have the podcasts to stretch your legs to pre-Toffs/Ziggys/an escapade amongst the painfully well-dressed in Leeds.
How. To. Follow. That? Well, America has manned up with the all-out media attack of The Fader. Technically the website for the US culture and fashion magazine of the same name this blog combines posts on mainly American-based music with longer articles and fashion photography. Other sections of the site deal with more in-depth reviews and fashion, and are worth a look. The posts are to the point and compensate for the lack of downloadable mp3s with a heads up for good new videos and some great competitions. The real gem here, however, is the podcasts.
Along side a fairly perfunctory hip-hop heavy music podcast, the site offers the whole of their magazine as some sort of magic pdf podcast download miracle. I can only imagine how swish this might look on a video ipod (I cling on to my black-and-white-screened baby in the knowledge that soon it will be retro and I will be a little bit cooler) and how incredible it might appear on an ipod touch… The magazine is really pretty, a little like “Dazed and Confused” with big pictures and articles about up-to-the minute cultural happenings. If you want to catch the next trend coming over from New York, or just do a little spying to see if they party as well as we do (answer: nearly. New York is NOT London.) this is the place to be.
TA DA! There you go. And in that cultural clash of the titans there isn’t just one winner. Because we ALL win. Well done you.
You can download a number of the 1/2ALIVE remixes here.
Great read.
yeh... apart from how can any serious arts reviewer reference miss-teeq??
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