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 />
First up The Rich Girls Are Weeping, a Brooklyn based blog notable for the fact that it is written by two women. In a male-dominated music industry where the majority of female input is as the front for a manufactured product (with apologies to Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell et al) it is refreshing to get a feminine perspective. The two contributers, Cindie Hotpoint and Pinkie Von Bloom (possibly not the names they were christened with, although it's nice to pretend), post a mixture of new music and songs that they consider to be old classics, recently including Blondie's Sunday Girl and Nina Simone's Sinnerman (sampled on, amongst other things, the sublime opener to the new Timbaland album "Oh Timbaland").
the limited perspective lends the blog the air of a window on the musical lives of another person, rather than simply a list of the music that they like.
The posts are fairly erratic, sometimes firing out every day for a few days in a row, and sometimes not appearing for four or five days, but the length of the excited and chatty reviews and the quality of the music makes up for that. The perspective is unashamedly American, and the new music is concentrated mainly on that which appears around the Brooklyn scene and the New York scene as a whole, but that is quite nice as it lends the blog the air of a window on the musical lives of another person, rather than simply a list of the music that they like.
Our second contender today is something a little more stylised, 1.618 forgoes the use of text and attempts to convey the experience of a piece of music by image alone. This is highly effective, both in setting the blog apart from the crowd, and as an artistic endevour. Taking the concept even further, the menu for navigating between songs reduces the image to a single colour. Currently it seems as if there are few songs on offer, but a quick click through to the first archive shows the full extent of the project.
The type and age of song varies, meaning that the real pleasure here is browsing through the images on offer, ranging from wildlife photography to pictures of wild nights out to arty compositions, and discovering if your impression of an exciting picture, or an interesting or whimsical picture, corresponds with the music that the bolggers have chosen it to represent. This method, of finding an image that you can connect with on some level and downloading the song, is a great way of finding something new music, or a new style that you never thought you would like.
The title of the website is a reference to the golden ratio, and this, along with a link to The Gentle Group, a San Diego and New York based arts collective, lends the site a touch of mystery. Thankfully it also adds the impression that, by being understated in an industry that seems to survive on the use of the superlative, this is a place to find some peace.
