Seriously, is it us? We post essentially bemoaning the state of modern print music journalism, and broadsheet writers promptly spend the week in some sort of competition to see who can write the most pointless, horribly written article.
The Independent set this year's gold standard with its curiously celebrated "those commercial indie bands are a bit uninspiring, aren't they?" piece, which hardly required Woodward and Bernstein levels of elucidation and stealing the "landfill indie" phrase from The Word in the process. Last week's 'Mikachu: wacky pop for now people' headline was bad enough never to make you want to hear her work, never mind that the piece misspelt Michachu's name throughout. This week, they've spotted that digital downloads don't tend to have cover art. With less pedigree, The Times had to have a couple runs at it to get it right, the first a piece about the rise of Ibiza club culture and its commercialism which, yes, was apparently filed this week rather than being a commemorative ten year reprint. There was this half-year's 'the girls are taking over' piece which skilfully ignores how if Santogold and Lykke Li were to have struck a commercial blow for females (this being so much more important to such writers than mere critical acclaim), "the Arctic Monkeys" skilfully Biro'd over where "the Kaiser Chiefs", "Coldplay" and "Travis" have been sequentially Tippexed over, they'd have done so by now with all the build-up, and shows up its own lack of knowledge by asking the not exactly short of angles herself Camille about Carla Bruni and starting a paragraph "Naturellement..."
The Guardian, printing so much more music pieces than their direct competitors, are particularly prone, but yesterday touched some sort of bottom. There is plenty to be said, thought and debated in the wake of the story about Babyshambles being banned from Moonfest because they might have overexcited the crowd. While you'd like to think it'll open a debate about police powers and the post-Criminal Justice Bill potential for a swingeing clampdown on entertainment, what it's actually done is encourage articles like this. Textbook work from Tim Jonze here - self-denial (Tim, we know you also work for the NME. There is no earthly way you're unaware of Babyshambles recordings), cliche aided pot shots at people that have nothing to do with the issue at hand (what have ATP ever done to him?), betrayal of lack of knowledge based assumptions (in what way are Holy Fuck a noise band?) and the season's favoured clipboard cut and paste. Yeah! Take that, commercial indie and your being "not the best place to catch discussions on the work of Michel Foucault", because of course that's an entirely natural and helpful thing to say about any music.
No, we haven't taken the Telegraph to task, but Neil McCormack manages that for himself every time he sits down to write anything.
And for god's sake, who really voted in, or indeed believes a word of, this arse?
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