Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Friday Music: Digging ASMR, in reply to Rickai,
Blair Strang the actor from Shorty St?
Ha ha, no! Kane Strang. Thanks for the heads-up. I clearly had Blair on the brain.
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Also: a public screening in Auckland of Simon Ogston's Bill Direen: A Memory of Others on Saturday August 5.
And The Builders play Golden Dawn the night before.
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Further viewing: a good George FM profile of Jess B from a couple of weeks back.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Melodrama, in reply to nzlemming,
It’s not Lorde, it’s the whole damn industry.
And has been for a long while now.
It's not actually the revenue, which is stabilising – and has increased for two years running in New Zealand. It the way whole damn thing actually works.
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From the New Yorker review:
After a while, the record feels less like a subversion of pop tropes than like a hyperintelligent narration of them. “I know this story by heart / Jack and Jill get fucked up and get possessive when they get dark,” Lorde confesses on “Sober,” a song that is perhaps about a drug comedown; it’s also about the experience of being too lucid to ever really feel drunk. Once an outsider comfortable exploring the superego of pop, she’s now inside it, grasping for the keys to its id.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Melodrama, in reply to Ken Double,
His comparison of ‘Liability’ with ‘All the Young Dudes’ is completely mystifying,
But this touches on some very interesting points:
I still remain ambivalent about “Royals,” and because there’s no reason why a good song couldn’t survive – couldn’t thrive on – an ambivalent response, I’m sure I’ll keep Melodrama around in November. I like her album but she’s still got traveling to do. Having worked Pure Heroine into an old-fashioned sleeper hit just before the era of album-equivalent units, she caught so many of us off guard a redress is inevitable. I think she will record better albums. But she’s so young that I worry she won’t survive another hype cycle. In a way Lorde reminds me of semipopular figures like Chris Isaak or a Suzanne Vega: artists who got lucky once and settled a couple albums later into quieter career patterns sustained by an immoveable fan base. We don’t live in that era any more, alas; artists can’t live on streams alone.
A Facebook friend with an unfortunate (and negative) bee in his bonnet noted other commentary suggesting that, basically, Lorde and her album aren’t optimised for the Spotify era.
And it’s true. Lorde will have a No.1 US album this week without having a single tune in the US Spotify Top 50. She’s No.1 on the iTunes worldwide chart, nowhere on the Spotify global chart.
And maybe that’s just how it’ll be. The top of the Spotify global chart (Luis Fonsi, DJ Khaled) is utterly risible and really nothing to do with what she does. Being Chris Isaak wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but I don’t think that’s a good comparison either. I find it hard to believe that the age of streaming means there will be no place for artists who make albums.
Also to note: Melodrama will be No.1 on the Billboard 200 album chart with first-week sales (including "sales equivalents") of 80,000-90,000. That's two places better than Pure Heroine's first week – but Pure Heroine hit No.3 with 129,000 sales. It's not Lorde, it's the whole damn industry.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Melodrama, in reply to lloydois,
That's an excellent observation.
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And … Todd’s gone.
That is, he will stay on till the election but will not content Clutha-Southland for the National Party.
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Speaker: Seeking out the Spomeniks, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
have you ever considered branching out into Soviet-era bus stops?
I could certainly be persuaded.
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Tom Semmens,
factional horse trading
seems to underlie this Barclay debacle
Exactly! How that jumped up toff got the nod in the first place is the real mystery.
I get a strong whiff of Simon Lusk in all this. He's been fond of bragging about the twentysomethings he's grooming for power.
And as we've seen before, it's creating a massive factional shitfight that will now begin to surface.