editorial: Jamie Milton
words: Jamie Milton and Matt McDonald
“Lists are subjective, all of them are the same anyway, blah blah blah”. For lists that sum up a decade, publications such as ours as much more likely to agree with others because a consensus is easier to reach because we’ve had a good ten years to reach a consensus. A lot of the albums we’re about to mention in our own top 20 will have no doubt been featured in others. A couple of choices might not have. This isn’t a publicity-stunt list, citing Crazy Frog as a dance music pioneer and placing Scooter in the top five because of its “revolutionary achievements”. Guess what our top five is and you’d probably be right. This list is a consensus between the blog’s writers and we’ve made every effort to nudge you along into listening to some of our choices by writing lots of nice words next to each choice. These are the albums we believe to be inventive, decade-defining tour de forces.
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mp3: Colorado
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mp3: The Modern Leper
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mp3: Grounds For Divorce
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mp3: Taper Jean Girl
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choices 12-15 coming tomorrow…
words: Jamie Milton
Don’t pretend you haven’t spent the last five days re-visiting pitchfork.com for the next chapter in their top 200 albums of the decade list . You might have left the page thinking “Hmm, that was totally predictable…” and yes, it was. Without splashing out any spoilers for you poor deprived readers, the list, bar some dubious ordering, had a consensual winner and the site certainly didn’t go out to name a nobody just for some PR kudos.
Other publications, including ours, will find it difficult to differ from the list. If you go over to Pop Tarts Suck Toasted today and have a gander at their list, you’ll probably notice that nearly every choice could also be found in the Pitchfork list too. PTST is indeed a blog that represents the P4K-taste, but Pat himself would have found it difficult to include any surprise choices. This is merely because we’ve had a good ten years to assess the albums making the lists, time to re-consider evaluations. That’s probably why these lists will be so scarce of 2009 releases, although granted, 2009 has been decidedly below-par. There is a consensus already that Arcade Fire, Radiohead, The Knife, Sufjan Stevens and Interpol, amongst others, have all made some of the greatest albums of the decade. There’s no breaking away from that. And so you’ll probably be able to draw parallels between nearly every other list you see and believe me, you’ll be growing tired of them very soon.
But these matter an awful lot. Why? Because yearly lists can be scrutinised and mocked when a retrospective shadow is cast but these decade lists…they have an almighty importance in guiding new music listeners in decades to come to scrawl back through time and discover the music their Mum and Dads used to love. If a particular album is picked in its masses as the best record released between 2000 and 2009, it’s going to be difficult to resist. And so it’s satisfying that Pitchfork, the most influential taste-making music publication in the world, have resisted temptation to tip an outsider. It’d be unfair to give glory to the underdog.
Music Fan’s Mic’s own summarisation of the decade will be published from October 19th, where you can find out our top 10 songs of the decade and our 20 top albums, alongside some other miscellaneous lists.
I’d expect most visitors to Music Fan’s Mic — a blog that many would classify as an “mp3 blog” first and foremost — would find the subject of file-sharing a tiresome one. But reading the perspective of someone who would by some, be accused as a culprit of file-sharing, could be interesting, maybe? I hope so.
A vast amount of my blog’s visitors (a good 70/80%) come via. Hype Machine. Therefore, they’re on the blog for just about five seconds – enough time to click on the link to the blog post, scroll down to the mp3 and click “save link as”. My aim when Music Fan’s Mic started was to build an online community of people who shared the same taste as mine. I found it increasingly difficult to draw in visitors, particularly those who comment on a piece, and was always in limbo as to whether to continue publishing my reviews on the site. Nowadays, mp3’s are a ways and means of attracting those who might come to MFM to stay. I want them to read the content more than anything, but everyday I’m reminded of the fact that in reality, the majority of those who find MFM couldn’t give two fucks about what it stands for or its thoughts on a particular song.
There is no way around this. Music journalism used to be prized, far more important. It used to be a nudge towards someone actually going out and buying a record. But nowadays, album leaks allow everyone around the world to hear an album before reviews are even published. Therefore, they allow their own individual thoughts to simmer, making an average music review as useful as only having a toaster when you want to heat up some soup. Yet something still compels me to write, essentially, hoping that people might care and might value the way I write and what I have to say. I didn’t start Music Fan’s Mic as a means of making a living, I started it because I’d always written reviews, as a way of gathering my thoughts and putting them to one side. It was just a storage space at first, now it’s one of the highest priorities of my every day.
In the UK, momentum in gathering behind a collection of musicians’ efforts to decrease the rate of file-sharing in the country. They’re not naive, expecting to completely remove the problem, but they’re meeting together in order to gather ideas, smart ideas in fact. The latest in the line of thoughts is the plan to “squeeze bandwidth” from internet users who choose to file-share on a regular basis. Admittedly, someone who’s had their internet restricted will find ways around the measure, such as using a friend’s computer or getting a friend to make a copy. There will be loopholes, but it will at least cover some ground in restricting the movement of file-sharing in this country. Lily Allen is seemingly the head of the meetings, although in no way should there be a “leader” of sorts. This should be a unison, not an elite. But it speaks volumes that members of Radiohead and Pink Floyd are joining hands in an effort to curb the impact of illegal downloading.
But it’s too late. File-sharing is global and can only evolve. Across the world, (cue Bono) every time I click my fingers, an artist loses out on £2. It’s a vicious circle but if file-sharers can find ways around the proposed measures from Allen and co., musicians should also be making efforts to find ways around not being able to make a living out of their music. And they are, iTunes, ‘In Rainbows’, ‘Intimacy’, we’ve seen experimentation.
It would be wonderful if release dates mattered again, if anticipation returned and if reviews would once again have importance. But it’s all too farfetched. It’s difficult to see how it can evolve from here but the internet will only become faster, more dangerous for musicians who want to make a living. Music journalism is also on its last knees, but it can also evolve. There will always be interest in interviews, opinions from top-class journalists. As file-sharing increases in volume, as does the chance that an everyday teenager will come across an LCD Soundsystem or the “next big thing” where without the internet, they never would have.
The next decade will see similar efforts being made to those currently emerging through Allen and her cronies. But at the same time, music downloading will never cease and can only grow with faster broadband speeds and an ever-growing cloud of hype that surrounds acts like Washed Out, The Drums, The Xx, in a matter of days. Music press and its efforts to find the next Vampire Weekend/Strokes/etc. only spurs on this ridiculous movement of buzz that in turn, increases the rate of downloading. It’s undecided as to whether a blog like Music Fan’s Mic will survive as an effort to match intelligent journal input with the link to a song that everyone seeks.
Right now, mp3 blogs aren’t the big culprits. Most urge a hypemachine user or someone on a forum to “check out this amazing band/song/show”. A lot of passion is involved. Torrents and .rar files are the enemy, but yet in a matter of minutes, you can have a fantastic album on iPod. That temptation is understandably, too much for most. In my position, I believe that music journalism probably won’t exist in music blogs after a few more years, but passion and energy, the key components to making a music blog, will still remain.
APRIL: A Short, Swine-Flu Free Summary
words: Jamie Milton
Thank heavens we were preoccupied with ordering batches of masks and tinned food this month. Had it not been for the global pandemic which WE DEFINITELY SHOULD NOT START GETTING COMPLACENT ABOUT, we’d have been bored shitless. Music was pretty rubbish and it’s got me thinking that 2009 is going to be an even worse music-year than 2008. At least last year by this time we had the pleasure of Cut Copy, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver and No Age, all single-handedly saving the year from a dreadful collapse. This year, the big guns have delivered and The Horrors have got brilliant. But there’s not much else to say apart from Mica Levi can’t cut it live with an acoustic guitar, but she sure can on record.
April was devoid of triumph and stand-out moments. Instead we were treated to a solid batch of follow-up records and a couple of stinkers. Super Furry Animals officially put out their excellent ninth record, Welsh accents included, with ‘Dark Days/Light Years’. And fellow veterans Doves made the four-year-wait worth it by revisiting their epic, uplifting rock sound. Bat For Lashes went a thousand steps forward with her second record ‘Two Suns’, with Yeasayer adding a crafty edge to the songs. Song-wise, nothing will top ‘Daniel’ this year. It’s quite simply, flawless.
The Veils’ third record was unsurprisingly sophisticated and expert in songwriting, with unsurprisingly impressive results. Camera Obscura might just have made their best record yet with the dreamy ‘My Maudlin Career’ and Bill Callahan (pictured) surprised us a little with his twisted lullabies in ‘Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle’. The only disappointment came in the form of Metric, which to MFM’s annoyance, everybody else seems to think is pretty good. But for fuck’s sake, it’s really not. The Enemy didn’t disappoint, instead they wowed us with their laugh-out-loud lyrical content (“You know there’s no such thing as a free meal // There ain’t no future in British steel“). Well Tom Clarke, there ain’t no future in Mexican tourism for the time being but you don’t hear THEM complaining. They probably are though, they’re just a bit far away.
APRIL’S RELEASES, IN SCORE ORDER:
Super Furry Animals – Dark Days/Light Years — 8.3
Doves – Kingdom of Rust — 8.2
Bat For Lashes – Two Suns — 7.9
(mp3: Sleep Alone) [alt]
The Veils – Sun Gangs — 7.9
Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle – 7.7
Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career — 7.6
Brakes – Touchdown — 7.2
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz! — 6.5
(mp3: Hysteric) [alt]
Metric – Fantasies — 3.9
The Enemy – Music For The People — 3.8
TODAY’S A GOOD DAY TO BE A MUSIC FAN, WITH A MIC’
Good timezzz.
Keep it up, lovelies.
Here’s some songs about being happy.
mp3: The Aliens – The Happy Song (zshare)
mp3: The Maccabees – Happy Faces (zshare)
MFM @ HYPEM
