November 9, 2009 – 9:14 am
Last week, Crikey asked me to write something for the pay-for-view newsletter on the huge, earth-shattering controversy of Britney Spears’ lip-syncing. It is now reproduced below with a new update….
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September 17, 2009 – 10:20 am
I interrupt my brief hiatus (I have a deadline for another project) to pay a small tribute to Troy Kennedy Martin, one of the great geniuses and innovators of television drama. He died the other day, aged 77.
The show of his getting most of the attention — rightly so — is Edge of Darkness, [...]
September 7, 2009 – 11:08 am
On Twitter this morning, @flopearedmule mentioned this recent piece by novelist/journalist Nick Hornby.
As much as I like Hornby’s novels, I’m not a fan of his music journalism. I find a lot of it preachy. He always seems to me to have a real chip on his shoulder and — in a business that is built [...]
September 4, 2009 – 10:06 am
Alex Ross, one of my favourite music writers, has a piece in The New Yorker about the way improvisation has been used in classical music. It’s an interesting topic because improv is not something we normally associate with that form. Certainly the classical musicians (including the odd conductor) I’ve known over the years [...]
August 20, 2009 – 10:08 am
Anyone else tried Amie Street? I just set up an account so that I could try it out and haven’t really got too far with it, but here’s the basic idea:
On Amie Street, the community determines the price of music. Every song starts cheap (or even free!) and increases in price up to 98 cents [...]
August 18, 2009 – 11:38 am
I’ve shied away from discussion of the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock. Largely this is because the topic has become ubiquitous throughout the media so there are plenty of other articles that you can read. And partly it is because, as much as I enjoy talking about the music of that period and the [...]
August 10, 2009 – 10:03 am
Last week I published a guest by Marcus Seal, a member of Association of Independent Record Labels (AIR) who is also the MD of Shock Entertainment. It dealt with a dispute between that organisation and the broadcasters MTV and VH1 Australia.
Today we publish a response from MTV.
By way of reminder, Marcus Seal’s basic contention [...]
August 7, 2009 – 10:44 am
This is part of an ongoing blab about the future of music. Which means it’s an ongoing blab about the past of music too.
So as much as I might look back fondly on those heady teenage years of listening to music crammed into someone’s bedroom, and all that went with it, the simple fact is, [...]
August 3, 2009 – 11:20 am
Triple J’s Hottest 100 caused a bit of stink when it was released because of the noticeable absence of female artists. I’m not sure I buy all the sociological conspiracy theories about why woman were so under-represented, but it does strike me as a musical tragedy that it panned out the way it did [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately — ever since I started this blog and began seriously reengaging with music, in fact — about the whole of experience of listening to music.
Growing up, music was always a social experience. You got an album, you went to someone’s house, and anywhere between two and twenty people would [...]