No flowers by request

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/music/newsid_10000000/newsid_10004800/10004881.stm

The article is bobbins, but does include this amusingly comprehensive sentence:

"The Rakes, The Twang, The Rascals and The View all returned, or emerged, with new albums and braced the climate or split up."

Comments

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Borderline-irritatingly, I was going to write a thing about this yesterday but got bogged down in navel-gazing over my own old reviews. Me and Mark were discussing it mildly drunkenly in the kitchen a couple of nights ago; it was obvious that all of this would die and my thesis that whatever Radio 1 plays enough to be trendy will sell is sort of proving itself.

Not that most of these bands were remotely independent; the Enemy, in particular, are and always have been signed to a major with a huge quantity of money poured into them. They were my bane when I was writing for Chartblog and they very much represented everything that was shit about these bands, along with Little Man Tate.

Also, proofreader alert:
"Whilst radio stations were chickening out of playing guitar music - Kasabian just came out and said, 'Hang on a sec, guitar is great and always will be and hears a record to prove it',"

I think the concept that there is some form of "guitar music" here is so problematic I cannot describe my facedesking. Guitars are in all fucking music these days and pretty much have been since their invention; Lil Wayne does guitar music, Rihanna very definitely does OVERTLY guitar music and what they're actually talking about here is BORING FORMULAIC MUSIC which somehow everyone tries to go "oh no, look, it's got a guitar in therefore it must be fresh and new and FACEDESKFACEDESKFACEDESK."

[miss-newham.livejournal.com]

I like "the impenetrable wall that was Florence and the Machine, N-Dubz and Susan Boyle", though it may give me nightmares about THIS ACTUAL WALL.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

article conveniently ignores Kings Of Leon who were never out of the charts last year with their hoary efforts (albeit originally released in 2008).

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

This article seems to be the equivalent of a lot of head scratching about how Cast, Shed Seven and Kula Shaker could possibly have failed to sell a load of records in 1999.