Precisely what is wrong with "boys with guitars"?

For me personally I tend not to like the sounds guitars produce when they're the lead instrument, rather than there to add colour in a pop or R'n'B production, say. I'd think the same thing if the flute was the dominant pop sound. The boys thing I have no problem with.

xpost yeah I guess so.

I must confess that when I see a picture of a "new" band and it's gtr/bass/drums or gtr/gtr/bass/drums, played by young men, it makes me not want to hear the music.

but if Nick means rock bands, then yeah, it's oversaturation and the whole thing feels like some sort of orthodoxy and tradition, also the goals and dreams of the average rock band and their ideal for what music should sound like and the role of music, aswell as those of their fans, always come across as so so stifling and restrictive.

most of the boys-wiv-guitars i hate either seem like a) jumped-up student bands who think this is an acceptable aesthetic, or b) morons who think that merely growing up in the sticks and being outsiders qualifies them to be social commentators.

"you know what type of boy, i don't have to elaborate, think back to university."

mmmm, but i knew lots of idiotic cokeheads at university -- maybe this is why i didn't get into electorclash.

Like, we seem to rely on guitars for creating a sense of the epic in rock; if we bring in synthesisers they have to be strictly complementary and subservient. I used to love "Big Music" (or at least some of the 90s UK equiv. of same) and still have a soft spot for it - but maybe it's for this v. reason that I love the JLC remix of "Mr. Brightside" so much, it found a way to be Big that had nothing to do with U2.

x-post I wish I'd been a uni student who could afford to be an idiotic cokehead!

Okay that's not true; it had heaps to do with the ambient opening to "Where The Streets Have No Name".

But I sort of wonder if ILX love for "Clocks" boils down to, "oh look! A piano!" This would not render said ILX love illegitimate of course.

Guitars, however, can still sound beautiful.

The way The Killers allow synths to mingle with guitar bass and both conspire to render lead guitar somewhat irrelevant in a lot of their songs and their sound in general is perhaps the most interesting thing about them/their success.

coldplay are usually less offensive than most other boys-wiv-guitars but it's not the piano which makes them unbearable, it's his voice.

that's another HUGELY objectionable thing about boys-wiv-guitars: NONE OF THEM CAN SING.

Oh no they're not

otm

There wasn't much fuss Stevem, it just surprised me.

say whaaaat?

Nasty scoundrels.

I don't see much support for this. Vanessa Carlton: really? Maybe I haven't been paying attention. And I'm pretty sure Ben Folds Five is in disfavor here.

The guitar is one of the most versatile instruments out there, especially with all the amps, effects it can be played through, etc. I don't think I'll ever get bored of all the different ways the guitar can be played, the problem is just too many people playing it in the same way.

Boys with laptops/drum machines/mixing boards are the new boys with guitars anyway.

I dunno--I'd say the White Stripes came close. Though that was more of a seeping-through than an explosion, a la "Teen Spirit" or whatever.

My problem with the state of rock right now is that the bands that get mainstream airplay seem to be either doing this Wynton Marsalis-ized version of it or trying to compete with rap in "heaviness".

I think Deerhoof is a great rock guitar band who manages to sound fresh, but they're not quite in hitmaking territory.

disscus

This reminds me of the point another ILM "type" made recently that when The Strokes first came on the scene, they were seen as part of the same movement (in fact, even kinda "bandwagonish") of At The Drive-In.

There in lies the point of this whole debate. As Nick Southall (UK editor of Stylus) started this thread it’s quite conceivable that the “boys with guitars” phrase is this taken directly from or at least to some extent inspired by The Lex’s rather infamous Stylus Jukebox comment;

“Boys With Guitars. I am loath to make sweeping statements, but it has to be pointed out that if I were to make one along the lines of "Boys With Guitars have absolutely zero to offer to popular music any more", there would be ample evidence to support it in the form of, oh, every single Boys With Guitars band on the entire fucking planet right now.”

This is the extreme position if you will but the “boys with guitars” in a more general sense seems to be a term analogous with a kind of conservative yes R*ckist way of thinking. Certainly in British terms the last 5 or so years have seen the mainstream media becoming more and more inclined to this way of thinking, were they ever otherwise? I am to young to really know. This thinking seems to have filtered down to the “real world” in quite an unpleasant way. But this is a touchstone of the ILM “thing” innit? Or at least the London ILM. A reaction against the stifling claustrophobia of the “boys with guitars” indie mentality…

A more reasonable formulation of what you're saying is that something is only recognised as the dominant mode when it can no longer satisfy everyone's demands, and its alleged universality is revealed as an exclusionary hegemony.

Since styles of music do not follow one another in an orderly linear fashion, and the spectrum of contemporary music fandom is characterised by partiality, no-one can agree on the terms of what is universal, what is hegemonic and what is partial. Lex thinks we're drowning in a surfeit of boys with guitars; Geir thinks we're starving from a lack of them.

Nothing has or will ever do this though.

NO!! NO! NONONONONONO!!!! ARGH!!!!!

is this how things work? the media have ideas, and they 'filter downn'. i think public taste is more complex than that. how or why this preference is 'unpleasant' is up to you.

i would be interested to read exactly what tom thinks is the difference between busted and mcfly. i agree that sonically they're not doing the same thing at all but in terms of their audience, their image, and how i react to both (in practice: yay! but please turn the songs off apart from a couple of mcfly gems), i find them v similar. mcfly as busted pt 2 obv, or maybe pre-busted.

the hegemony idea is weird because one's perception of it really depends what circles you move in: my reaction to BWG isn't so much informed by any cultural dominance they have as it is by the shock of emerging from my hipster bubble of electro and r&b and pop and grime &c &c to find that there are still vast swathes of the country who prefer sodding art brut.

'bluntian acoustica' aaaaargh.

i think you're right in that music obsessives went a-downloadin' five years ago and many never looked back (obv. they still buy now and then to varying degrees), in conjunction with there being more people over 40 than under 40 in the UK now, or something i.e. the number hasn't risen it's just that other numbers have fallen.

Mixing the concepts "Art Brut" and "vast swathes of the country" implies a certain paranoia Lex.

increasing lefty-liberal consensus that Culture is a Good Thing (and evidence that one is a Cultured Person being important to one's social status in a weird keep-up-with-the-joneses way, i feel that nick hornby is largely to blame for this, the cunt).

i don't even know what this means, but if anything it favours grime and MIA and other 'exotic' things over art brut (who they?) or james blunt. but any case the hipster ghetto has its own 'keeping up with' syndrome, whether you think the music is better or not.

most people don't read about music. they get to hear what gets played on radio and tv. some of them read reviews in popular non-music mags and newspapers. but these people care about music enough to buy the occasional record, be it blunt, imbruglia, maroon 5, franz, or especially best-of comps.

they 'don't care' as much as you, but then you're a music writer! as to their motives -- well, i doubt it's duty. they probably like what they hear just a little bit, you know, or they wouldn't pony up for it.

i don't even know what this means, but if anything it favours grime and MIA and other 'exotic' things over art brut (who they?) or james blunt. but any case the hipster ghetto has its own 'keeping up with' syndrome, whether you think the music is better or not.

I vaguelly agree with Lex - I don't think it would favour MIA over Art Brut, because it just favours whatever is mentioned in the press and has a pop.cult. profile, and MIA doens't necessarily have that high a profile outside of the net and "esoteric" media; she's perceived, if at all, as "weird", and "weird" and "cultured" are not the same.

GIER SHUT THE FUCK UP.

nick otm. mia isn't Proper Culture, she's ethnic. ethnics are only acceptable if they work with c martin, cf jamelia.

ha xpost

-- The Lex (alex.macpherso...), October 13th, 2005.

oh, bollocks. mia got 'weekend on sunday' love, cf/ miss dynamite, dizzee rascal, roni size, tricky...

I bet Gier has amazing taste in, I dunno, melodic coffee or something, to make up for his shocking taste in melodic music.

That may well be so but how many people actually bought the records? Not as many as FF.

-- Sick Mouthy (sickmouth...), October 13th, 2005.

well, exactly. it's not the observer's fault if these acts didn't 'catch', though.

xpost to nick

Yeah, that was kinda my point Nick!

lex: the weekend on sunday ignores ethnics, except jamelia cos she world with coldplay
me: no, what about mia, dizze rascal, tricky -- they got covered
nick: they don't sell any records, compared to franz
me: that's not the weekend on sunday's fault
nick and steve: british people be racialist
me: er, but they do like black pop stars, just not ones who play 'difficult' music.

Yeah but isn't that like a hipster indie kid saying "I like Kanye"?

But why do, say, Roots Manuva and Dizzee Rascal sell a lot lot lot more copies than Shystie then?

You also like Nine Black Alps don't you? Or was that slander?

haha X-post!

Dom because Shystie was kinda weak and also very badly marketed. Also they're blokes with back stories - Pentecostal dad / mental illness and the urban waif failed music GCSE thing.

""Dakota" is just "She's Electric" for a post-Killers generation"

"just"

i don't. like. nine. black. alps.

'dakota' is fucking terrible. it has k jones's voice on it ffs!

lead interpol bloke was fit once.

xpost

But Dizzee Rascal's sounds weren't really familiar until he entered into the charts. Ditto Franz Ferdinand or The Coral.

wtf @ dom? dizzee is not a success; and you can't GET more familiar than the coral!!!

???????

how in the world were their sounds unfamiliar?!

Dizzee Rascal: more popular than MIA, less popular than Roots Manuva. It goes.

whaaaaat?

Who was making music that sounded like the Coral, and getting in the top 40 with it, prior to them? Seriously, maybe I'm just missing someone.

oh fucking the thrills or... it's just blah 96 britpop, i don't know.

re: who was making music like the coral: boys. with. fucking. guitars. they all sound the fucking same.

The Music = post-Verve Led Zep + groove wah-wah hod-carrier funk psychedelic, Thrills = West Coast (of Ireland) harmony soft-pop and Coral = Scouse Zappa + Beatles freakbeat.

i always thought green day fandom carried a serious social stigma with it, like admitting that you were into horse porn or that you enjoyed guy ritchie films. and now people are admitting it in public? shame, shame, shame on our society.

popists are just as awful as rockists.

I guess the idea is that there have been a lot of boys w/guitars groups, going back a long way, and so it's harder for them to sound fresh, especially to jaded ears like mine.

in theory i like boys with guitars, but they all end up a bit samey for me, and sounding too much like other old stuff.

Both these posters I believe are older than the NME type demographics of yr Art Brut’s or Kaiser Chiefs though I guess a lot of these bands take in audiences of the same age who perhaps are not seeking anything “new” but something “samey”, something reassuring perhaps, as rock in the mainstream sense seems to be stuck in the retro rut, (could it not be? Another question in itself, I guess) if one is still looking for something that doesn’t sound to much like “old stuff” then perhaps rock music is not the obvious choice of music. Are the younger BWG’s fans unencumbered by history hearing something fresh or is it more about relating in some kind of sociological type way? This attack on BWG seems slightly different from what we could call the “Lexian” position. People who have heard, digested and maybe at some point enjoyed pretty much all the tricks in the BWG’s book as (is this position sort of similar to the that taken by the “thirty something Wire reader in spectacles”?) opposed to a natural inclination against BWG’s.

is this how things work? the media have ideas, and they 'filter down'. i think public taste is more complex than that. how or why this preference is 'unpleasant' is up to you.

The Artic Monkeys or the NME? The band or the hype? The chicken or the egg? I guess the media can only push public thinking if it is already headed in a certain direction or there is something waiting to be tapped into. BWG’s seems only to have really seem marginalized between fall of Britpop and 2002 return of rock. The whole ROCK IS BACK thing seems far more amorphous and so easier from a media POV to sustain than Britpop, Grunge etc any “movement”. All that unites modern B(and girls)WG’s is converse perhaps? The “unpleasantness” I implied is what Lex and Dom raised up thread. They and others who have passed through higher education in the last few years can confirm the stultifying conservatism that seems to seep from the NMEdia (how closely does NME thinking define wider mainstream media spectrum?) through any student newspaper / radio station. Is this naïve though, was it always thus?

Can you really call The Coral Britpop though? Britpop is the art of drawing a line between The Beatles and The Smiths crossing through one other act, was it Love for them then?

I recently noted when talking about the last Franz Ferdinand single that (note new italicisation)

“One way of defining what is commonly known as Britpop is to take it as a genre of music that takes the Beatles and The Smiths as the beginning and end of a narrative, the alpha and omega of British rock, then maps a way betweens these two poles. Suede went through Bowie, Blur took a route through The Kinks and the Pet Shop Boys, Elastica; Wire and The Stranglers and so forth. Do You Want To seems to make a beeline from Twist And Shout to Handsome Devil by way of Roxy Music, the New Pop "movement", Duran Duran and many, many others.”

I may have myself ripped this, if not verbatim, from John Harris’ Britpop book, it does rather fail when one considers the later “Britpop” bands they could be alternatively classed as “Noelrock” or just "shit". Perhaps just sticking it all under the retro rock banner is easier. Though that is a bit lazy as it totally fails to explain how Saint Etienne, Denim etc could be Britpop.

If 'popism' means 'what I think', though, then it's sceptical of (or maybe just bored of) the narratives of suburban escape that a lot of BWG music likes to draw on.

re: sociological factors vs innate antipathy - i think the latter (in my case certainly) still has roots in the former. except in my case it isn't so much getting exhausted with what BWGs do as getting exhausted with what straight white men do even before i get to pop music. virtually every aspect of western society bears the imprint of straight white men, and in some ways i guess art is a refuge from that because of its tradition of allowing other voices to be heard. the transgressive elements of pop, especially if framed in an ostensibly mainstream, commercial context, are one of the form's most powerful aspects, and to see people like james blunt and coldplay and franz ferdinand get critical and commercial respect seems like social regression in a way.

(obviously i am not saying that straight white men cannot make transgressive music. but the type of straight white man who thinks that the best contribution to popular culture they can possibly make is via a fucking guitar...no.)

x-post.

I was thinking about this w.r.t comics, and how for someone aged 15 coming into reading Marvel Comics now the narrative tricks and tropes that bore me are exciting for them (cos they've not seen them before, and they're being done with a certain difference in style too, a slickness that feels very of-its-time. But also I wonder how this imagined 15-yr-old deals with the 40 years weight of continuity, like how do they relate to it, do they feel like they've arrived late at a party?

And I wonder about this w.r.t pop too - the continuity of BWG bands, how much do 'ver kids' care about it? This is something quite clever that Conor M's NME has done I reckon - it doesn't look back too much, it does the pop perpetual present thing that Smash Hits used to, but at the same time it's not iconoclastic, it doesn't break away from 'the past', just as well since that would look ridiculous.

When I was 16 and starting to buy the NME something that was hugely exciting was the references back to older bands, tho never beyond punk, and the idea that music was really moving forward, had been since '76 and by being into indie you were an early adopter, someone in a vanguard of musical development. The 'difference from the mainstream' thing was important too but shared thought-space with this progressive ideal. I think the balance of rhetoric has totally tilted away from that now, so it's harder for me to empathise with what a kid gets out of the new BWG stuff, apart from the obvious social-framework stuff which is a constant (and to be fair is always 90% of why people are into music).

multiple xposts which I might get to soon

Personally I reckon FF are pop, they're pop with an image I think is lame tho.

x-post.

Also wtf is wrong with small towns? Precisely. (This is maybe an ILE thread...)

I totally understand small towns and suburbs. It's the "my god growing up in Bromley was so awful thank god I escaped" thing that rubs me up the wrong way. I mean you walk around London and half the people you see are from families who probably moved continents to change their lives, which is a bit more impressive than leaving fucking Haywards Heath, surely?

i don't really think the war is popism vs rockism AT ALL now. libertines fans aren't necessarily traditional rockists, ditto for britney fans and popism. there are too many different aesthetic lines being drawn all over the place for it to be that clear-cut.

I mean obv. the Kaiser Chiefs aren't fun, but the people I know who are really into Maximo Park/Louis XIV/KC (or even White Stripes) love the "party" element of it, the grinning funk-like frenzy, and there's obv. lots of this in reigning-kings FF. (Contrast with weepy un-fun Coldplay/Keane, who half the 'rock' people hate. On the other hand, also note the increase in 'fun' in the last Coldplay record...)

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/essays/2005/01/during-goldrush.html

Remember when PFM tried to coin the term "Fluxpop"? Oh the hilarity.

there's totally at tom-popism that's part of the ideology (but not the actual listening habits) of the haircut people.

Yeah, but they "go" for Mis-Teeq and Lemar and Sugababes, whilst, conversely, I don't remember Popjustice going apeshit over the last Necro album.

I wish I still had all my old issues.

they can't be more scared of them than the white BWGs though (factoring in the fetishisation aspect)! rather than actual 'racism' i think Popjustice, like many, may just be uncomfortable mentioning a lot of hip-hop because of the evident hostility prevalent between the two subcultures.

http://www.pfmpfm.it/discografia/chocolate_kings-3a.jpg

Which says it all, vis a vis my finger being on the musical pulse

http://www.stu-p-didiot.com/stu/soundscover_final.jpg

http://thearchive.free.fr/prunes_best316.jpg

indeed. there's a special yahoo chat room for that.

The kids haven't had a clue about good music since the mid-to-late 80s. Liking Green Day is actually one of their better sides.

not that i've ever been there of course

(X-post haha I was wondering when someone wd notice that!)

There was certainly a lot of fun in mid 90s Blur and Oasis though....

The man has a point though, Britpop was generally seen as fun before it became all big and "significant" (hello Mr Ashcroft) hence the pop part following the Brit. Fun for who is the question though...

*ahem* this has of course nothing to do with me not being articulate and intelligent enough to think in the same ways as you guys ;)

People wondering why grown men and women (though it's a majority of the former here and most other platforms) spend so long intellectualising something as trivial (yet culturally HUGE) as pop music might as well be asking why the video games industry has journalists working in it.

I don't think any music liking is pure or uncompromised Lovelace - when I was 14, 16, 18 I would always be approaching music with the idea of 'what will my mates think of this / think of me for liking it', I care a lot less now about that, and it's just as much an 'impurity' as theorising about pop.

What I always say when this comes up is that the love comes first for me, and what I do with the love - an ILM thread, a chat, playing stuff in a club, putting songs on a tape for my wife, whatever - is a result of that.

I think what I mean to say is are we jaded old schmucks with too much historical perspective to enjoy something on it's own merits, and has popism's rush to make everything enjoyable on its own merits been ultimately self-defeating?

Was that ever popism's desire anyway?

this needs backing up, really, unless not liking hip-hop is racist now.

This is the quite good trick about a lot of Pop now. As Tom says it's like comics, in that to a 13 year old Rachel or Franz will appeal for the freshness of their sentiment whereas someone twice that age might appreciate the amalgamation of ideas in the sound more (tho Franz are a bad example of this, i just think they have potential to be a lot odder and that would be a very good thing). So two bases are being covered and the product is appealing to a wider range of people as a result.

"What's this?"
"It's the new Goldfrapp single."
"It's kind of glammy."

(But is she?)

Yeah precisely. Although oddly "popism" is often accused of trying to institute precisely such a heirarchy of purity as Lovelace implies must exist (why is it that questioning the existence of a heirarchy is always read as wanting to simply turn it upside down?)

but anyway when you're a teenager your reactions to music maynot be pure, but they *are* ignorant, and that means that it is easier to like some stuff you might later write off as derivative. so i liked a bunch of britpop cos i simply hadn't heard wire or even david bowie, etc, etc.

It could depend on the guitars, but probably not.

I used to be a boy with a guitar. Even now, I am definitely still somebody with a guitar. So I am not going to attack people for playing guitars, whatever they are, whatever they seem to have become, I hope.

My feeling is the opposite. I love (some of) the sounds that guitars (can) make when they are the lead instrument, to the point where, I was thinking today, this must be one of my criteria for pop. Because I saw someone in a Stereolab T-shirt and was thinking about why I don't much like them, and one of my reasons was that I don't remember them using guitars as lead instruments, in the way that lots of people I like do. (Perhaps they do, but I haven't heard it, or they don't do it like I like it, or etc.)

And no, I probably would not like it.

Things that are wrong with "boys with guitars," aesthetically: subjectively speaking, jack shit

I mean, christ, can you come out as a big Strokes/White Stripes/FF/Killers fan without having people think you're a Cro-mag reactionary dipshit stricken with devolutionary tastes and mopey nostalgia? Y'think people might like the lyrics, which as far as most of these nu-rock bands are concerned skew a bit closer to Dusty Springfield and Duran Duran than Bob Seger and Grand Funk Railroad? If I am ever cornered by any of you at a party, should I keep a copy of Separation Sunday in my pocket to ward you off cf. vampires/garlic? And does "Disco 2000" disprove everything said by BWG-hatas in a fiery gust of destructive pop glory?

Fuck it, I basically agree.

The White Stripes, FF are/have been alright though. Both could do better. I'm not an enormous fan, they just seem more colourful than the rest somehow.

Right now seems like an odd time for "boys with guitars".

If Britpop was a reaction to the prevailing guitar-based rock of the time (shogaze, grunge, early post-rock (in the UK sense)) which ended up wiping experimentation/risk taking off the radar of peoples expectations for the whole scene...

Well, right now it's as if Britpop (v2.0) and non-backwards rock (defined (by me) as: that which isn't worshipping the past, it's own history & influences, isn't content to recycle social stereotypes & act out tedious cliches of how bands are 'supposed' to behave ... that which is attempting to be 'new', is open to electronic influences, or at least post-1990 ideas, that which is unsure or unaware of it's place in the market. I get the feeling almost ALL the stude bands are very aware of their placement & quite happy about it).

It feels like both sides of the coin, good and bad, are happening at the same time, only guess which one (again) the NME is caring about?

(meanwhile dance is off doing it's own thing, but that's another thread really)

If it isn't clear by that convoluted mess above I'd guess the MBV, Slowdive, Seefeels, Nirvana's of today would be Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, Wolf Eyes. Probably this sounds ridiculous, I haven't, I should say checked out any of those three beyond the odd mp3 which has usually left me dry & uninterested to look into them further.

Basically, I don't hear many people complaining about those boys with guitars much.

The question posed by this thread seems specious to me. Taking a feeling usually encountered in a specific context "oh fuck, another shitty retro student pleasing "indie-rock-pop" outfit, how much longer do we have to suffer this shite" and applying it to all men ever with guitars is wilful misinterpretation for the purpose of ... Nick to blather on about Embrace again? Who knows?

I realised I do generally tend to follow any weak praise I might have in conversation about some "boys with guitar" band or song with a follow up statement that apart from exceptions this kind of music is UTTER FUCKING SHITE these days (imo).

I mean, christ, can you come out as a big Strokes/White Stripes/FF/Killers fan without having people think you're a Cro-mag reactionary dipshit stricken with devolutionary tastes and mopey nostalgia?

The answer is, probably not!

Where are the Elastica, Sleeper, Echobelly equivalents* in the Top40 today? If the Faders had been more 'real' maybe they could have done something. Otherwise, it really seems like a very a male club at the moment.

I can only think of the Fiery Furnaces off the top of my head... and they seem to be off doing unchartable oddness. What was the last female-fronted outfit the NME really got behind? The Distillers?

*No, I'm not going to slur Kenickie by association with them.

ok, they'll do. Funny, I've never taken to them completely but if I think of them (and her) as representing the same lineage to the '00's as Justine Frischmann, Louise Weiner... the other one, did to the '90's.

She's about ten times the frontwoman of any of them isn't she really? Fucking Yay for Karen O!

Fennesz (OMG GUITAR+ELECTRONICS+NOT IN BAND = DOES THIS COUNT??!)
Johnny Greenwood (OMG GUITAR+OTHER SHIT = DOES NOT COUNT+WHITE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM!!!)
Ichiro Agata

to that list.

and the guy from the Yeah Yeah Yeah's ... maybe. I'm still hoping they have something better than Y Control to come next. I find them pretty unlistenable, even on 'Maps' but I DO appreciate they're doing something different (also they're a whole shitheap better than DFA1979 who seem to be the other act closest to them in style, but they suck). I'd like to think they'll really crack it on the second album.

(and more)

You can't say he hasn't had a stylistic influence, whether or not he's *that* great a guitarist.

meh. meh.

how bout: J Mascis, Neil Young, Sterling Morrison (old, old, dead).

ok i'm done.

but, in the present creative climate of a million shades of greyness being lapped up by "the kids" (and implicitly defended by Nick Southall, though he hasn't really answered the question of what's right other than to weakly say "I like the sound of guitars") because it has BIG CHORUS WHITE STUDENT MALE-BOOZE-MAN appeal we're very unlikely to find one?

I'm just trying to think of examples of
a) not dead
b) not old
b) likely to have crossover appeal directly or indirectly

Jack White doesn't really count. He's not boring but... meh. Not outstanding either.

Kaki King I would like to think could have an impact one day, I'm not totally sure she has the imagination to break out of her tiny niche though. or that she would be any good in a band. I could see her fulfilling some kind of BJ Cole role to young & upcoming bands perhaps. I mean I'd want to work with her, she's... hot.

i'm inclined to think, without being able to say exactly why, that the era of the guitar 'genius' is over (at least for a while) or very nearly so.

I've never seen anyone finger tapping (with utter calmness) a raging, noisy flamenco on the fretboard before, and I was amazed enough at how raw, alive & versatile she made a little acoustic sound over a whole album (as the sole instrument) before I even saw the video so... Yeah.

If she's not a genius she's undeniably a virtuoso, and who knows when inspiration might really grab her. "Loveless" wasn't the first MBV album. I just hope she doesn't get sunk by expectations, or people being easily pleased. I get the impression she's a tough cookie though, and strong minded so far.

Funnily enough I heard 'Dry' for the first time in ages the other day. Peej is indeed absolutely storming. I've always been dissapointed in her after the first 3 records though. And even 'Dry' was fairly heavily influenced by Throwing Muses I reckon. I'd put Kristin Hersh and Peej about level. Excellent, but not mindblowing, but the equal of almost any guys around.

Maybe we all just have to wait for the Pixies to come back round!! Maybe not.

how old are you, like fucking 60?

I was going to use the 'but what about 80s Smash Hits' argument re any further talk of RacistJustice, but maybe it doesn't really work. Maybe 00s Smash Hits is the better comparison? How much coverage did black urban artists get in Smash Hits this decade?

Then again, perhaps that argument is not worth having any more than it's worth arguing with the man like Hongro.

To other, extremely clueless, people, the following are wrong:

- They are boys
- They have guitars
- You can't dance to their music
- They tend to play proper songs with verse and chorus and melodies and all

The Music are the ones with boring unmelodic songs while the other two have great tunes.

Sums it up for me! Lock thread etc.

-- Konal Doddz

OTM, for many people (NME, rockist stereotypes) The Streets = Great, but Arctic Monkeys? Greater! ... but why??

smash hits, totp magazine et al have always acknowledged the greatness of the most successful r&b and hip hop acts - beyoncé, fiddy, destiny's child, eminem et al. racistjustice barely deigns to recognise their existence.

The Music are the ones with boring unmelodic songs

geir otm!...

while the other two have great tunes.

...it could only last for so long.

Didactically not liking anything for a specific reason which has little or nothing to do with actual quality and enjoyment thereof

no, my dislike for guitar boy music has EVERYTHING to do with quality and enjoyment, viz., a) it is shit and b) i do not enjoy it.

'when you're a famous boy...'

-- Real Goths Don't Wear Black

the exception to the rule!

I think that probably can help bands to stay interesting, if the producer's a strong collaborative presence. Tho I've got nothing against inspired one-off singles followed by two albums' worth of filler and an acrimonious break-up either.

I think a large part of "BWG problems" is a reflection of an individual's own active and passive (ie. environmental) listening habits. Noodle confirms this to some extent: his (her?) initial problem is getting past the marketing image to the actual music.

This, too will pass, and in a few more years we'll be complaining about the next sound of the moment dominating the press and airwaves and release schedules.

wtf?

That's if you believe in cycles of course.

-- Konal Doddz (stevem7...), March 21st, 2006.

oh how we lacked for rock in 1998-9...

and massive attack, of course.

OK Computer and Urban Hymns excepted, Manics plodded on painfully. Travis turned up and actually won awards/topped lists because there really wasn't a more 'exciting' rock band out there in the eyes of a scary amount of people (Kid A would also freak many of these people out).

IS THIS 3 YEARS AGO?

WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?

all rubbish! see!

i've thought of a song with guitars i like from this year, that gossip single.

i'd never heard OF 'raw power' until just now, is it an album or a song?

Lex, Kano's only good song (apart from that one with Klashnekoff) is a nu-metal tune!

xpost you wouldn't her?

no that one is absolutely dreadful. his best song is either 'ps & qs' or 'boys luv girls' or 'what have you done?'

Not any less today, with Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, Arctic Monkeys and Maximo Park around.

Apparently Ozzy Osbourne has a huge lower back tattoo of Merv Hughes.

Does Karen O play guitar?

(Yes, Nick, it is. Well, it is if you think it's Lex.)

The Lex with Dom Passantino and William B. Swygart, yesterday.

I like to think of it as more the new Barry Krishna (which, infuriatingly, appears to have VANISHED FOREVER)

but with one important one difference (besides from the fact that the arctic monkeys use shitey guitars)
mike skinner makes music workling class youth would actually listen to while the arctic monkeys come from a scene that reaks of the university student union and which to me makes it a total fraud that only deluded nme readers could ever take as real

But then, who needs influences from the 90s or 00s when you may go and get some great influence directly from The Beatles, The Kinks, The Who, The Small Faces, The Jam, Squeeze, The Clash, Madness, Specials or even Duran Duran or Human League and make great music based on influences from their music instead?

;)