what's wrong with this picture?

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

As Wu-Tang Clan producer Robert "RZA" Diggs notes in the promotional bumf accompanying the rap collective's fifth album, hip-hop is in dire straits. In the US, its stock has tumbled to the point that its primary function seems to have become the production of hits based around novelty dances: the chicken noodle soup, the krumping clown dance, the Aunt Jackie. This is the genre once known as the Black CNN reduced to the level of Black Lace's Agadoo.

From today's Guardian.

• Obviously this is the frame for his argument, i.e. AP has to raise the stakes in order to turn a mundane album review into a 'state of modern culture' think piece.
• The rapper said it, so it must be true. Huh? Hasn't the 'hip hop is dead' line been used to sell pretty much every big hip-hop album for the last few years? Why not analyse that instead?
• 'primary function'? Wow, you mean the primary function of a type of music is to make people dance?
• But the real issue I have is with 'reduced to the level of'.  So things change, and the ways things change might involve new patterns  of visibility, different musical 'product', and I'm sure the way people use or respond to Agadoo is different to the way they do 36 Chambers. Yet as soon as you say 'level' you place yourself in the position of the person who grades the levels. Your style implies an alignment of your judgement with my judgement, a consensus world in which we all agree to look down on the schoolkids youtubing their dancing and the wedding disco DJs. (But this position is the editorial style of the paper in general, so meh whatever).
• WILL THIS SORT OF SILLINESS EVER GO AWAY? Or will I just learn not to get irritated by it?

The Friday Canon: FLEETWOOD MAC

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Yes, the next most requested canon was those rather hirsuite chaps and chapesses from Fleetwood Mac! Thanks to their habit of releasing more albums than singles you have just FIVE ticks to dish out over their 16 UK Top 40 hits.

[Poll #1102069]
Gwen/No Doubt: (link)
=1. Hollaback Girl
=1. What You Waiting For
3. Don't Speak
4. Hella Good
5. Just A Girl
6. Cool
7. The Sweet Escape [ft Akon]
8. Let Me Blow Ya Mind [w/Eve]
=9. Spiderwebs
=9. Wind It Up

POPTIMISTS READERS POLL 2007: OM NOM NOM NOMINATIONS

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

It's the biggest poll of the year, started a week earlier than last year because I've realised I get to demob for Christmas spectacularly early this year, hurrah.

Basically, as last year, fill in the poll, and then the most nominated things will be presented in a series of other polls through the rest of December to determine 1x (or indeed 12x) winner. Easy! There's no specific 'closing date' on this poll, but obviously once we've voted on a category that's that.

EDIT: I fucked up and put "less" instead of "more" on the last question. So what I will do is ask both in the final poll, with the same nominations for each! Solved!

[Poll #1102127]

Where though is the single of the year/track of the year poll, surely the most important? Well, BECAUSE it's the most important it's going to be its own separate thing, results announced in the new year, so the voting for that won't start for quite a while.