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 toss: London-based 2ManyScenes. This blog gives a window onto the London dance scene, and is worth following if you’re from the capital and you want to keep up to speed, you’re planning to move to the bright lights when you graduate and you want to know some of the right names to drop, or just out of interest in what the beautiful people are dancing away to.
A highlight here is the down-to-earth, fairly regular updates on the grime scene, now ageing a little but still one of the busiest and most important movements in UK music at the moment. It’s hard to find really recent stuff on grime without wading through the slightly tepid RnB flavour it’s taken, but there are a number of posts here worth checking out. There is also a good smattering of dubstep, what’s really driving the pulse of certain sections of London students (get involved on The Dubstep Forum). Here you can get some bass so dirty that it will annoy your housemates/ neighbours/ fellow citizens of York while simultaneously making you want to check eBay to see if there’s a subwoofer going cheap. These are real house party gems for that 'it’s 2am and loads of people have just turned up that you’ve never seen before' vibe. You know the one.
For when it all gets a little bit too much, there are also some really relaxed grooves on offer. Recent posts have included tunes from Sebastian Tellier and the wonderful Little Dragon that could really take the edge of the morning-after feeling. By using the name 2ManyScenes the bloggers are recognising that to be a comprehensive source of information in their chosen field is impossible, but by posting on a variety of genres within dance in a cheerful and informative style they are providing an honest snapshot of London’s nightlife.
Second toss: In Search of Arcadia. Forget all honesty – here is a place to lose yourself in the giddy joyfulness that you felt listening to a new band in your early teens, the feeling that ‘the kids’ probably experience now when they listen to whoever the NME is pushing this week. The Yorker Arts would like to be the first to say that ‘this is not a bad thing.’ We are all for excitement and the kind of hype that can make your stomach twist upon hearing just the opening bars of the most exciting song of the moment. So here it is: your John-Malkovich-esque window into the mind of a fourteen-year-old. Except the blog is written by a twenty-five-year-old from Michigan, who has retained an innocent love for British music by living in a country that isn’t saturated by a cynical music press and a tabloid culture that gloats mercilessly over the downfall of anyone in the public eye.
As the title suggests there is a good amount of new wave stuff on here, Doherty, The Subways and Arctic Monkeys featured a lot early on, but these days the posts are more involved with nu rave and the endless stream of bands that receive the tag. The blog is a fantastic insight into an American view of our latest indie trend (although it does seem like we’re due a new one. Anybody fancy mixing indie with dubstep?), making the squabbling and genre-bashing seem petty. This means that bands can be examined on their own merits, rather than through a cynically tinted cultural lens, meaning that a few words on Athlete can sit between an article on To My Boy and Frankmusik. In this world of inter-scene haters isn’t a little more innocence what we need?
You must log in to submit a comment.
