MEDIA SLAG
September 2007
A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the media machine. This month Khalid Mallassi takes a stand against our favourite keepers off the peace, bouncers… (more…)
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Media Slag
July 2007
A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the media machine. This issue Thomas H Green froths at the mouth about good old-fashioned cultural conservatism
There was a feature in UK broadsheet The Guardian lately entitled ‘Meet The Future Of Pop Music’. The idea it put forward was that there is no longer futurism in pop but that everyone harks back to older styles, pointing towards Mika’s Freddie Mercury fetish and (the most excellent) Amy Winehouse’s borrowing of Motown tics. The article bizarrely holds up Simple Kid as one of the only artists who dares to stare innovation in the eye and queries whether it is still possible to create original music today after all that heritage since 1955. (more…)
Media Slag
April 2007
A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the media machine. This month Guy Oddy looks at the phenomenon of the band reunion, when getting back together isn’t the hardest thing… (more…)
Media Slag
December 2006
A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the media machine. This month Thomas H Green rips into ageing music journalists like himself.
Let me start by saying I’m 39 years old. Such a statement is blasphemy in music journo circles. Music journos are afraid of their age. You can make jokes about anything in their company but start jesting that they don’t understand a song because they’re too old and they look very uncomfortable. (more…)
Media Slag
A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the media machine. This month Thomas H Green snarls on unrepentantly about rehab culture.
Lily Allen’s saying she’s “through the worst” at 21. She’s talking about hedonism, drugs, late nights and misbehaviour. What is she on about? She’s 21, for heaven’s sake. She should be just getting started. She’s not the only one – there’s a list of them longer than the arms of that guy in the Fantastic Four. From Kerry Katona to Keane’s Tom Chaplin, celeb culture has reached a stage where young stars have to receive media absolution for their sins before they’ve even learnt how to sin heavily in the first place. (more…)
Media Slag
A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the music business with its rabidly sycophantic ally, the music media. This month Garry Mulholland on the girl-powered death throes of feminism
The British media is full of shit. Hell, its our raison d’etre. But, every now and again, an outstanding piece of shit happens along that stinks so bad, it redefines the entire arena of shitness.
Some of you may have seen The Observer Magazine, dated July 2nd 2006. If so, you may well have been bemused, amazed and downright disgusted by their cover ‘story’. Subtitled ‘An extraordinary and moving story of one woman’s longing to start a family’, it featured an anonymous Sloane bemoaning her failure to ‘have it all’. She had money, top career, tastefully expensive home, health, her own teeth, floppy blonde hair, and the means to spend years in endless therapy and what the navel-gazing bourgeois like to call ‘self-actualisation’. Yes, this woman had been to paradise, but she’d never been to her. (more…)
Media Slag
A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the music business with its rabidly sycophantic ally, the music media.
This month editor Thomas H Green, one year into Beatmag’s existence, defends its raison d’etre.
One year into Beatmag’s existence it’s time to set the record straight. Some of you have noticed that Beatmag is affiliated to Beathut, the independent music download website, and also to the record label Catskills. Some have also assumed with reasonable logic that Beatmag is then simply a rather high-fallutin’ promotional device or press release for anything involved with Beathut and Catskills. Fair enough but far from true. (more…)
Media Slag
A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the music business with its rabidly sycophantic ally, the music media.
Moniker Monitor
Ah, Snow Patrol, let me count the ways I loathe thee. Now you return with a new album, ‘Eyes Open’, relentlessly touting the post-millennial rock star mantra of “I can’t believe how lucky we are, I’m so grateful we’re just normal blokes” guff.
Even bloody Embrace, once a bullishly arrogant bunch of Yorkshiremen, have joined the ‘I can’t believe how lucky we are’ brigade. True, they did go through what looked like a terminal commercial slump, but that’s no excuse.
Oasis, bless ‘em, muster a sneering insouciance, even when their music is turgid rubbish that Status Quo would hesitate to release. (more…)
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