Archive for February, 2012

I try to buy a new album release every week. Some weeks it doesn’t happen simply because there’s nothing new that interests me, but some weeks when that happens, I just plump for something anyway. Some times it’s because I like the cover art, or I’m intrigued by that little write-up that Fopp do beside the new releases, or some times it’s because I’ve heard of the band at some stage, maybe years ago in some magazine review that I can barely recall, or maybe plastered all over advertising posters in the underground.

I’ve discovered some good albums this way (Twin Atlantic – Free) and I’ve also come across some stinkers (The Blackout – Hope). But either way, I enjoy finding new bands and hunting down new music. In a way I prefer doing this in physical, actual, 3-dimensional record stores (they still exist, just about), possibly because the sheer choice and volume of new music on the internet is impossible to even comprehend.

But regardless, the internet is the way to find, listen to and share new music for this and all foreseeable generations, and that’s the way it is. How you choose to find the new music you listen to is down to you. But increasingly in this day and age it’s on the taste-making music blogs (of which there are hundreds) that hold massive sway over which of the ‘hot’ new bands you’ll be gushing over on your Facebook wall. The debates rage across the hipster, scencster, whatever-er blogs and forums that position themselves at the bleeding edge of all that is new and worthwhile in music, and I tend to stay firmly out of it, occasionally looking on from afar like a rubbernecker on the far side of the road to a 10-car pile up, but never getting out to go examine the gory details. And I’m completely happy with that. I’m set in my ways.

So this brings me onto Lana Del Rey. I’m going to assume that you, dear reader, are aware of Lana Del Rey, and if not, here’s a link to her breakout, viral video hit from 2011, Video Games.

A nice song. So nice in fact that the Guardian declared it their song of the 2011, a perfectly understandable choice, and who am I to judge? You should hear some of the shit that made my list.

So anyway, I was mostly oblivious to Ms Del Rey and her viral hit. I say ‘mostly’ because I noticed the name on the Guardian list, but like most of what their music section prints, I took little notice of it. I caught little flashes of her name appearing on various Twitter streams, but again, paid no heed to those either. Who listen to anyone on Twitter??…

Then the posters for her debut album started appearing – everywhere. Now usually I would ignore any new album that’s thrust this aggressively down my throat by major record labels, especially if they are by a new female vocalist complete with a run down of hyberbolic press review snippets declaring them to be the new, new, new, new,new (ad nauseum) Voice of the Year!!!!. see Adele, Florence + The Machine, Little Bird, etc etc.

But I was feeling adventurous, fancied trying something a little different to what I would naturally go for, and I quite liked the album title. I’d had a quick Spotify listen to the 4 songs they made available before the album release and thought they sounded interesting enough. She had quite a timeless, deep, sultry voice at times, one that has a vintage crooning quality to it. Some of the tracks had an almost trip hop feel to them, and for the most part, I thought it was pretty good. So on New Album Monday, I picked it up in Fopp for 10 of my finest pounds.

I’ve listened to it a few times and it’s not bad, if not completely my cup of tea. It has some great songs, some lovely moments, some lush and sophisticated string arrangements, some of those Portishead-trip hop touches I like, and a subject matter that, while I can’t neccesarily relate to wholeheartedly, is painted in vivid and compelling enough strokes to draw me in. It also has some clunkers on there. All in all, it probably wont feature in my favouirtes of the year come December time, but still, I don’t regret buying it, and I consider that a success.

But it was only after all this did I pick up on the massive internet furore around this girl, and this is what has compelled me to write this rambling post.

She is lambasted, quite viciously by an online music press/blog/mob that once held her aloft as their new darling. Her crime? She used to have a different stage name and a different image, and a failed first album. Lana Del Rey is a reinvention and thus fake, manufactured, ‘not indie’, and all the rest of that bollocks. The obvious idiocy of discrediting a pop album due to a disingenuous claim to indie authenticity is there for all right-minded individuals to see, and it’s really too tedious to go into.

But what bugs me so much is this whole online culture that perpetuates this nonsense, this music blog/tastemaker/entertainment news cyclone of bullshit that must comment and judge on absolutely everything in music, apart from of course, the music itself.

As a completely failed and unsuccessful musican that continues to make music, (yes that probably makes me somewhat bitter, but I digress) it is so depressing to see any new artist achieve even a modicum of success, only to get hauled over the coals for something that is a million miles away from what actually matters – ie. what the fucking song sounds like.

I don’t give a shit who you are, what your name is, or how many botox lip injections you’ve had, if I like your song, if it’s a good song, everything else is completely irrelevant. Obviously there are caveats to this, Joseph Fritzl could write the catchiest pop song of all time, and I almost certainly wouldnt buy it, but hopefully you get my point.

As if it wasn’t hard enough for new musicians in the internet age, when you are lost amongst literally millions of bands competing for the same bandwidth, you now have a ready-made, judge, jury and executioner in the form of all these music blogs and commentators waiting to discredit you for some bullshit reason that doesn’t actually change how your album sounds.

Is this some underhand way of providing a filter for people to decide what to buy? When the internet music fan is searching for the next album to steal from a torrent site, how do they know which of the millions of albums to get? You can’t download them all after all, you can’t listen to everything and whittle them down to what you actually like. So what do you do? Go to the indie blogs, full of idiots having variations of the following exchange:  ”Hey, all this shit sounds the same”, “yeah, but this dude has tattoos that he got when he was 11, he’s the real deal, let’s push him over that dude with the barely dried ink on his arm”, “sweet”.

What makes it even more frustrating is that you can sample everything now before you buy it, or even if you don’t buy it. The internet allows you to listen to pretty much anything via Spotify, Grooveshark and Youtube et al, and setting aside my personal gripes with those services for one second, that’s a great thing! Why? Because you can decide for yourself! It’s there! Listen to it!

Do you like it? “Yes” Then who cares what anyone else says.

Do you like it? “No” Then who cares what anyone else says.

I know I’m stating the obvious here, but I really was completely taken aback by the whole deluge of opinion around this Del Rey lady and her history, and even by the histrionic vocabularly used to spew their rhetoric across the soiled music pages of the blogosphere.  It saddens and amazes me that people who claim to love music can be so knuckledraggingly thick about this stuff.

Musicians who write good songs, sing good songs, or perform good songs should be supported (if you agree with the ‘good’ part).  If you don’t like who they were a year ago in a past life, just go and go listen to something else, it’s not like there’s a lack of alternatives.

Anyway, rant over. I am aware of the irony in me writing this and thus making myself part of the stinky cloud of keyboard-opinion blustering around Lana Del Rey as well, but oh well, I at least hope there’s a sliver of sense in there somewhere. It’s always about the song. Nothing else.

Next post will be a cheery new Down In Autumn music update as usual no doubt, so do check back.

Til then.

Blog music: I wrote this post listening to Green Day’s Insomniac album

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