Paying to spend the night in a room full of drunk people who can’t dance while the same songs are played week after week? No thank you. That’s not what the movies told us about clubs! Yet I still pay money into this industry even if it is just to partake in the activities rather than hear the dreadful monotony of it all booming from the club down the road. There is of course more to a good night than the music however one can only enjoy a Rihanna track so many times. Perhaps at this point it is the logical thing to go to another club but the majority of the time it seems that you’re getting served the same dish, just with different sides. Continue reading “The Great British Night Out?”
Category: Opinion Pieces
HOW DOES MUSIC JOURNALISM DIFFER FROM TRADITIONAL JOURNALISM?
For a lot of people, staying out late and talking to various musicians is the dream. For music journalists it’s just one part of a long day’s work.
When you’re not out living ‘the high life’ you’re locked away in your room listening to music all day, getting to know the ins and outs of note after note. Then you go and write about it, examining every little detail, just like the obsessive girl who writes letters about her latest crush to her most loyal of companions, “Dear Diary.” The job is then very much reminiscent of our teenage years. However, would you make the same comparison for someone writing about the latest war? Probably not. Continue reading “HOW DOES MUSIC JOURNALISM DIFFER FROM TRADITIONAL JOURNALISM?”
Role of the Critic
Frank Zappa once said “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” but what does this mean? Perhaps it suggests that the job of the music critic is essentially pointless, why read about music when you can listen to it? Or, in the same way that a dancer may know very little about architecture, the music critic actually knows very little about music. With the boom of online blogs run by anyone who fancies themselves a good writer, Zappa could well have a point. Continue reading “Role of the Critic”
What Makes a Good Writer
It is a cerebration of one’s brain that a respectable piece of workmanship should abstain from pretentious exhaustion of diction. Get any of that? What I meant to say was if I’m ever going to understand some writing I would prefer not to be attacked with a swarm of long words that hurt my brain long before I can begin to understand them. Rather, a good piece of writing should ideally stand as a clear representation of the writer’s thoughts. Continue reading “What Makes a Good Writer”
Media and Mythology
Is it mere coincidence that a handful of iconic artists have died at the age of 27 to join ‘the club’ or is this some kind of myth formulated by the media? Musicians die at many other ages however the media seems to have thrust the idea of the magic number 27 into our faces, formulating one of the biggest conspiracy theories in the world of music – are artists killing themselves to join the so called 27 club? The most recent example is Amy Winehouse; Mallika Rao wrote on The Huffington Post of the “niggling rumour…that the disturbed singer purposely killed herself to join the famous musicians known collectively as “the 27 club””. It is interesting to see the transformation of Winehouse as the center of drug related jokes, to an artist who fell victim to a tragic death, almost as if no one had dared joke about her drug abuse in the first place. Continue reading “Media and Mythology”
Women and the Music Media
I’m trying to decide which music magazine to buy and I can’t help but think a drooling, spotty, teenage boy should be standing in my place. It’s funny how we use a rack to display magazines to then display ‘racks’. Even when the music magazines don’t feature a sultry looking female, the surrounding ‘lad mags’ seem to point to a misconception that only men are interested in these music publications. Meanwhile, us women are shunned to the other end of the shelf to laugh at some famous face’s ‘red carpet calamity’. Continue reading “Women and the Music Media”
SAMANTHA MAE 