Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Grant McDougall,
While her music isn’t my cup of tea, I think that at 16 she’s been thrown in the deep end far too early. Popular music history is awash with people that were successful in their mid-teens and chewed up, spat out by the music biz only a year or two later, only to fade into obscurity and irrelevance.
Bear in mind that this began with her posting some free tracks on Soundcloud, less than a year ago. Those same tracks – the same actual recordings – have subsequently gone to number one here and might even do so next week in America. You’re suggesting what, that she and her record company should have done something to prevent that happening?
She’s on a promo tour at the moment, along with her mum. She performed a showcase at George Bizet’s old house in Paris this week. (Here’s the glowing review.) Even if it’s probably at least two years sooner than anyone could have dreamed, I don’t get any sense that she’s being chewed up and spat out.
Here’s what she wrote when they posted ‘Team’ to YouTube this week:
« I am in paris as i release this. Every street we drive down makes my eyes pop with the most incredible things carved in stone, and gilded on pillars, and wrought with metal; the heroes and heroines of this city aren’t so hard to find. this song’s are a little more mismatched, less classic courtesans on their pedestals, but nonetheless brilliant. this song is kinda of that world, and at the same time, very much of this one. enjoy. »
I'm inclined to let her get on with it.
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Y’know, if Russell decided to write a blog defending domestic violence, noone would try to suggest the position wasn’t all bad because it gave us chat fodder.
It would also be really awkward: "You know all those TV ads where I said 'It's Not Okay'? Well ...."
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Martin Brown,
He doesn’t have to appear here to defend his opinion.
My point was he hasn’t substantively defended what he wrote anywhere. It’s not much of a discourse.
And I have to say that's been characteristic of most people seeming to defend what Sweetman wrote: a lot of arm-waving about cliques and cabals and having a discussion, and almost no attempt to address any substantive point of criticism.
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Martin Brown,
but the good critics internationally are like him.
You're on. Which top international critic would you compare to Simon Sweetman?
They make people think, even if what they end up thinking is ” Simon Sweetman’s a wanker.” And he’s been good for 4 pages of interactivity here on what may otherwise have been a slow-blog day.
Except it's a discussion from which Sweetman is missing. He hasn't attempted any real justification of what he wrote, let alone thought the better of some of the nastier parts.
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Oh, for fuck’s sake – wouldn’t it be awesome if folks stopped defending Lorde against slut-shaming and sex-policing by pulling the same crap on Miley Cyrus? Here’s a radical idea: Both Lorde and Miley Cyrus get to exercise their agency as sentient adult women however the fuck they want. Don’t like it? Don’t look.
Woah, there. There would be a massive difference between a 22 year-old woman doing that 'Wrecking Ball' video and a 16 year-old doing it. And, for all her composure, Lorde isn't legally an adult.
I think Miley Cyrus’s risk with the ‘Wrecking Ball’ vid is likely not moral opprobrium, but ridicule like this . Because is is pretty ridic.
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Jim Welch,
Criticise Sweetman, by all means, but don’t generalise about our (my) culture by saying that the fact that he doesn’t like Lorde tells us much about anything other than what he thinks of Lorde. And do you really think Lorde cares? She has bigger fish to fry.
Jesus, you know, I think she would care a lot if she read that, and I suspect she has (her mother certainly did, and she'll have seen all the social media chatter). Some middle-aged man with an audience not only basically calls her a dimwit and a tool, he strongly implies her parents are bad people and then caps it off with a crude creepy sexual thing. How do you think you'd feel as a 16 year-old girl, for goodness sake?
I probably could have done more to note that quite a few people (including the likes of Wallace Chapman, which surprised) professed to agree with Sweetman. I don't think they took in exactly what he'd said.
I think that point where "I don't really get the music" morphs into "everyone else is a dupe" and "she's just being manipulated" is a bit tall-poppyish.
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Peter Darlington,
Which is fine, but you need to have some idea what you’re talking about. I got the impression he honestly couldn’t see what he’d done wrong.
He never does.
He generated another shitfight late last year when he slagged off a George FM compilation. It was hardly the kind of thing you'd expect him to like or get (and it might indeed have been a bit average), but this is more than half the review:
Here you will find traces of music, occasionally (it should actually come with the audio equivalent of a health warning) and there is the answer to the question whatever happened to MC Tali. She’s here. Again. I remember a decade or so ago she was being touted as some fresh voice, an original Kiwi MC for the dance/breaks scene. She released a horrific album. And promptly disappeared. Thankfully. Well she’s back – and we have to assume, given her “Bonus Beats” here where she gives a painful plug to George FM that she’s screwing someone at the station. My guess, from what I can hear, is that it’s the audience.
I think we can assume that he would not have suggested that a male MC was "screwing someone at the station". He gave no indication that he got what was wrong about saying that. It's unfathomable.
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Oh, bravo. Someone has reviewed Sweetman's review like he reviewed Lorde's record.
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Peter Darlington,
There’s definitely something passive aggressive in his writing, he’ll write some quality stuff on music he likes but he really feels the need to drop the hammer on what he presumably feels are sacred cows.
Which is fine, but you need to have some idea what you're talking about. I got the impression he honestly couldn't see what he'd done wrong.
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Che Tibby,
might send her an tweet asking her not to rap any more tho.
Good luck with that. She's not bad at it, imo. Certainly better than Lana Del Rey.