PJ dunkin'

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Pazz and Jop time again - here's my ballot, I feel a bit guilty for not taking longer over it. 2005 was a strange year.

(from that you can access the whole bunfight, if you like - I've not actually explored it yet, even the singles list feels quite distant from anything I care much about. Is it just me or do the concerns of US and UK music fans feel further apart now than any time since about '95?)

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Also: most US hip hop stars seem to have only the tiniest window of botherd when it comes to the UK - the singles will get released but even for something like 'Wait', the people concerned will rarely come over to promote it. And apart from the obligatory Big Single, r&b singers appear to feel the same. But this is really what separates Kanye West and Amerie from Brooke Valentine and Ying Yang Twins.

Maybe the heavy promotion of indie as 'antidote' to hip hop by Radio 1 et al is something of a tit-for-tat move.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Hein? In what sense does R1 promote indie as an antidote to hip-hop?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

It may be more the print media - I don't listen to the radio - but for the past few years there's definitely been a rush to promote British music, to drape people like Joss Stone and Franz Ferdinand et al in Union Jacks, which seems to feed on a suspicion of overly-glitzy trademark-American celebrity (Mariah Carey, Paris Hilton and so on: blinged-up hip hop is certainly a large part of this but it equally applies to Britney) as well as some kind of weird post-Iraq general anti-Americanism in certain quarters (and associated questions of morality and might: 50 Cent rapping about guns and bling seen as immoral, musical equivalent of bombing Arab nations and so on)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Oh, OK, maybe that's true - I don't read the print media! - but R1 plays plenty of US acts, and some hip-hop, maybe not as much as it did a few years ago though. It also never really comments negatively on anything, which gives it a slightly detatched, antiseptic tone. You'd be right to say that most of the music it really gets behind is British though, but as you said earlier this is partly an access thing.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I'm basing a lot of this on seeing LOTS of union jacks gracing the front covers of eg NME, Q and so on.

I can't believe Destiny's Child once got on the NME cover! Yes just as wank-fodder but that still seems really bizarre in 2006.

[juror8.livejournal.com]

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

ARRRRRGH make it stop.