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Showing posts from July, 2015

Kanye (plus Taylor Swift, Big Sixes and others)

This is essentially a continuation of the last post ( on the personal/private divide ), as I intended that one to make some brief points but the topic felt too deep to ignore. You don't have to read it to make sense of this post. I basically discussed how social media allows us to know the personalities behind the music we listen to. Whatever your opinion of him, even if it's sheer, bone crushing apathy (as it was for me for a while), almost every corner of the Western world has heard of Kanye West. I can't find a figure for how many people watched his performance headlining Glastonbury on Saturday night, but hundreds of thousands, or possibly a million odd, wouldn't surprise me. I watched it because I knew someone would ask my opinion of it. And people are talking about it, which is the ultimate goal - but we'll get to that later. Now we know more about our favourite musicians than snippets of live show ramblings, thanks in a CD insert, or the odd off-the-beat

The personal/private line: part 1 of several

Due to a conversation that began as a discussion about Kanye and ended with my mother shouting "Biffy Clyro aren't real rock, they're soppy rock that tries to be harder than it is because they're Scottish", whilst praising Twin Atlantic yet not being able to tell the difference between them, I'm skipping the dialogue and getting straight into the post. This was intended to be my promised post on Kanye, but as this rant got out of hand that'll have to be postponed - before this one is shared on social media, the next one will be being written, never fear. Thanks to the wonderful power that is social media, we're now at a point where we can know every detail of our favourite musicians' lives, not just through what the interviewers and professional journalists tell us, but from what the guerrilla (is that a fair term? You know what I mean anyway) journalists, free lancers, opinion bloggers, Joe Blogs, and, of course, reading, stalking, and inte