On a personal note, it’s the year I moved back to London, and stopped acting like a student. However, as this is uninteresting to no one but myself, and even then I find it fairly boring, I am going to try and get the last year in some semblance of order in my head, by going through the major pop culture happenings. I have a feeling it’s going to descend into stream of consciousness fairly quickly as well, so apologies for any structural weaknesses.
Music
It’s been a fairly unexciting year in music, for me at least. Of course there are some fantastic artists, but there have been no momentous albums…just take a look at the Q albums of the year:
1. Neon Bible - Arcade Fire
2. Icky Thump - White Stripes
3. Favourite Worst Nightmare - Arctic Monkeys
4. The Good, The Bad & The Queen
5. Magic - Bruce Springsteen
I found Neon Bible disappointing, and certainly not as heart-stopping as their debut. The White Stripes seem to have descended even further into caricature, The Good, The Bad & The Queen was an album of ideas, but too disparate to be really good, and I’ll be honest and say I haven’t listened to the Springsteen. Of the five, the only one I really like is Favourite Worst Nightmare. There are some really fabulous songs on it, and there’s a sense of a band of potential working up to a really great album, I can’t wait for the next one.
Other honourable mentions have to go The LCD Soundsystem album Sound of Silver, The Klaxons, and Radiohead (that fact that the album is really good seems to have got lost in the hype surrounding the delivery method), as well as Asobi Seksu, although the new album Citrus is nowhere near as good as their self-titled debut, which only got a UK release this year.
There have of course been a few fantastic singles, Umbrella by Rihanna is still not losing its appeal, and if you can enjoy the hopefully ironic pronunciation, Foundations by Kate Nash is lovely, as long as you avoid the rest of the album. It’s been great to see The Manic Street Preachers remember how to write good singles again, Send Away The Tigers and Your Love Alone stood up really well in comparison to older material when I saw them live in December.
I can’t really comment on the live scene at the moment, as I’ve been rather old-fogey like this year, I didn’t go to any festivals, and haven’t managed to see many gigs, of which I’m particularly gutted about missing Joanna Newsom. However, it does seem like two increasingly separate entities exist, the album/single selling bands, and then those that are successful live (of course, some bands cross the divide). A band can have a very comfortable success playing live to large audiences, but this doesn’t seem to translate into album sales anymore.
But really, 2007 has been the year of melt downs. Of course, this is a topic every pop culture commentator is covering, but then it has been the most entertaining thing to watch this year, as long as you’re comfortable with a bucketload of schadenfreude. We started the year with blanket coverage of Pete Doherty & Kate Moss’ relationship, and end it in a tabloid obsession with Amy Winehouse. It’s difficult to see Amy as anything more than a tragic figure at the moment, and hard to remember the period between her first (very good) and second (brilliant) albums, where she was just a mouthy, feisty and endearing London girl. The comparisons with jazz legends of old (cheers Lord Lloyd Webber), go further than the music, she’s become the stereotype of the strong woman weak when it comes to love, standing by her man however grubby he may get.
And then we get to Morrissey. Oh, what to say. Those who know me will attest to the fact that I have spent some years pretending that songs such as National Front Disco don’t exist. I love Morrissey and The Smiths, and I really can’t bear to think that the man who expresses with such perfect wit and subtlety my emotions, is a hypocritical xenophobe. Of course accounts of the interview he gave to the NME differ, but it seems pretty certain that he made some remarks, not of themselves offensive, but the thoughts of a middle-aged Dail Mail-educated grumpy white man, wrapped in some fairly unpleasant rhetoric. He then blogged on the Guardian Music website. At last! I hoped. Morrissey is going to honestly give us his thoughts on immigration, racism etc. What we got instead was an petulant rant about journalistic standards, and some weak posturing along the lines of ‘I can’t be racist, because I let an anti-racist organisation put their logo on the back of my album’. The latest news that Morrissey has donated some money to Salford Boys’ Club, while a nice thing to do in itself, just confirms it. Morrissey is a old, grumpy man. I’m going to get back to listening to the old stuff, and pretend the last six months have been Morrissey free. Delusion can be a great thing.
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