Category Archives: Music

‘I was worried Lindsay, Paris or Britney would die’: why the 00s were so toxic for women

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Body shaming, media harassment, relentless cruelty – it’s time to reassess the decade that feminism forgot

I went to university in 2007. On my first day, every fresher had their photo taken; the pictures were pinned to a bulletin board in my halls. That evening, older male students scrawled on the photographs of the girls, rating our attractiveness. No one got in trouble. Later, the same men published a gossip magazine that Photoshopped images of female students on to porn stars, dissected our sex lives and made rape jokes. The magazine was printed using university funds. No one got kicked out. None of this seemed particularly objectionable to me, an 18-year-old girl. This was just the way things were. Internalised misogyny ran deep in the 2000s. Hell, I was just happy I got a high score on my photograph.

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Poly Styrene’s inspiring sensitivity should be the true legacy of punk

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Mixed race, with braces on her teeth, Poly broke the mould of UK punk. A new documentary explores her struggle to find meaning in the Day-Glo chaos of modern life

The moment I heard that Marianne Elliott-Said, AKA Poly Styrene, had died, I was at band practice. We put on X-Ray Spex and jumped around, screaming along to Identity, Oh Bondage Up Yours! and Germ Free Adolescents. On that day in 2011 we lost one of punk’s greatest heroes and one of the few who really looked and sounded like me. She broke the mould of UK punk stereotypes. She was brown, chubby, weirdly dressed and had braces on her teeth. Even in an era when quirky, abrasive style was all the rage, she stood out.

Poly Styrene embraced this. She played with the attention her weirdness attracted, making a cartoon of herself. To be an artist is often to feel like a shiny trinket – hip and trendy one moment and disposable the next – and Poly had a fascination with all things garish and throwaway. She knew that through selling her art, she herself would inevitably become the product. Consumer culture overwhelmed and horrified her at times but she poured those thoughts and feelings into surrealist, confrontational art and music.

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Ian Brown pulls out of music festival over Covid vaccination row

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Brown, a noted Covid sceptic, has withdrawn from the Neighbourhood Weekender festival in Warrington in September

Ian Brown has pulled out of headlining the Neighbourhood Weekender festival in Warrington this September after claiming that all attendees require proof of vaccination.

Brown is a noted Covid sceptic, frequently using his Twitter account to spread disinformation about the virus and protections against it. “I refuse to accept vaccination proof as condition of entry,” he tweeted yesterday.

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St Vincent: ‘I’d been feral for so long. I was sort of in outer space’

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Inspired by her father’s release from prison, Annie Clark’s new album asks where to run when ‘the outlaw’s inside you’. She discusses his incarceration, the delusions of love – and why she remains as perverse as ever

The cover of St Vincent’s 2011 album, Strange Mercy, depicts an open mouth and teeth shrink-wrapped in white latex. It provoked much fascination. Was it Annie Clark’s mouth? She wouldn’t say. One song involved a pearl-handled whip, wielded for pain over pleasure; others negotiated submission and debasement. Perhaps it was a BDSM thing?

The startled questions showed the overnight evolution of Clark’s image from the “asexual Pollyanna” (her words) of her first two records. Over the following decade, she restyled herself as a white-haired “near-future cult leader” and then a “dominatrix at the mental institution”. She transcended her indie-rock origins to work with David Byrne, Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa, date the model Cara Delevingne and front Tiffany campaigns. Confounding such a journey into celebrity, her pyrotechnic pop got stranger and stronger.

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Bunny Wailer, last surviving founder member of the Wailers, dies aged 73

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Reggae artist and three-time Grammy winner found worldwide fame alongside Bob Marley in the early 1970s

Bunny Wailer, the co-founder and last living member of Jamaican reggae group the Wailers, who took Bob Marley to global stardom, has died aged 73.

His manager Maxine Stowe confirmed his death to the Jamaica Observer. Wailer had been frequently hospitalised since suffering a stroke in July 2020.

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Lady Gaga’s dog walker describes ‘close call’ after he was shot in robbery

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On social media, Ryan Fischer says ‘healing still needs to happen’ after he was attacked while walking three dogs

Lady Gaga’s dog walker, who was shot last week during a robbery in Hollywood when two of the singer’s French bulldogs were stolen, has described the violence and his recovery “from a very close call with death” in social media posts on Monday.

Ryan Fischer’s posts included pictures taken from his hospital bed, where he says a “lot of healing still needs to happen” but he looks forward to reuniting with the dogs.

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Gabrielle: how we made Dreams

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‘I was singing Luther Vandross covers in a club and a woman said: “This is as good as it’s going to get for you.” I went home and wrote Dreams’

When I was 12, I got up in the school canteen and sang a song I’d written called Teenage Love. A few years later, as I left school, everyone went: “Hope we you see on Top of the Pops, ha ha!” As if that would ever happen. A woman wasn’t allowed to look imperfect on TV, and I had a lazy eyelid. People would say: “Stop winking at me.” Singers on Top of the Pops all had long hair and beautiful clothing. I didn’t. I’d sing in my brother’s suits because I didn’t have the figure or the clothing.

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Like Pablo Hasél, I faced jail for my rap lyrics – but the worst censorship is self-censorship | Valtònyc

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The rapper’s arrest shows Spain has a problem with freedom of ideology. But people shouldn’t be scared to write songs that stand up to power

The arrest of Pablo Hasél this month, a Spanish rapper – like me – who is accused of glorifying terrorism and insulting the monarchy in his lyrics, didn’t surprise me. When I was 18, I wrote a song about the Spanish king, the police arrested me and I was sentenced to three and a half years in jail. The day they came to take me to prison, I fled to Belgium and have been here ever since, despite the best efforts of Spain to have me extradited. It seemed like a joke – almost four years in jail for a song. But it wasn’t: there are 18 rappers in Spain facing jail for similar charges.

Related: Angry words: rapper's jailing exposes Spain's free speech faultlines

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‘Record companies have me on a dartboard’: the man making millions buying classic hits

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Hit songs can be a better investment than gold – and by snapping up the rights, Merck Mercuriadis has become the most disruptive force in music

Merck Mercuriadis had a good Christmas. On Christmas Day, the No 1 song in the UK was LadBaby’s Don’t Stop Me Eatin’, a novelty cover version of Journey’s 1981 soft-rock anthem Don’t Stop Believin’. It replaced Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You, which had topped the chart 26 years after its original release. Both songs are unkillable, evergreen hits, which are closing in on 1 billion Spotify streams apiece. Both songs are among the 61,000 owned, in whole or in part, by Mercuriadis’s investment company, Hipgnosis Songs Fund, and epitomise the thesis that has made the 57-year-old Canadian, in less than three years, the most disruptive force in the music business.

Put simply, Hipgnosis raises money from investors and spends it on acquiring the intellectual property rights to popular songs by people like Mark Ronson, Timbaland, Barry Manilow and Blondie. In a fast-growing market, what sets Hipgnosis apart from competitors is its founder’s bona fides as a veteran A&R man, manager and record label CEO. Like an old-school music mogul, Mercuriadis sells his brand by selling himself. Unlike those moguls, he’s a buff, teetotal vegan with spartan tastes. “The only material thing that I really care about is vinyl,” he says. “And Arsenal football club.” He looks rather like a rock-concert security guard: shaven head, burly torso, plain black T-shirt, hawkish gaze. Mark Ronson calls him “the smartest guy in the room”.

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When Daft Punk went to Wee Waa: the strangest album launch of all time

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The tiny Australian town was surprised but got into the spirit, selling daft pork sausages and random access rissoles while celebrating a dusty agricultural show it will never forget

In April 2013 word got out that Daft Punk planned to launch their album Random Access Memories from a regional Australian town barely anyone had heard of.

Dubbed the “cotton capital” of Australia, the small town (population 2,000) with the evocative name of Wee Waa in the Narrabri shire of New South Wales was not much known as a dance music hub. The news, which began with murmurs about Sony label reps scoping the area for locations, seemed just bizarre enough to be true. Daft Punk, after all, were never great adherents of the traditional album rollout – and, with the revered French duo announcing their split this week, it’s worth taking ourselves back to their strangest one.

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Daft Punk were the most influential pop musicians of the 21st century

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By resurrecting disco, soft rock and 80s R&B, and bringing spectacle to the world of dance music, the French duo changed the course of pop music again and again

It’s hard to think of an act who had a greater impact on the way 21st-century pop music sounds than Daft Punk. The style Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo minted on their 1997 debut album Homework – house music heavy on the filter effect, which involved the bass or treble on the track gradually fading in and out, mimicking a DJ playing with the equalisation on a mixer; drums treated with sidechain compression, so that the beats appeared to punch through the sound, causing everything else on the track to momentarily recede – is now part of pop’s lingua franca.

In fact, no sooner had Homework come out than other artists started to copy it. Within a couple of years, Madonna had hooked up with another French dance producer, Mirwais, employed to add a distinctly Daft Punk-ish sheen to her 2000 album Music, and the charts were playing host to a succession of soundalike house tracks – 2 People by Jean Jacques Smoothie, who turned out to be a bloke from Gloucester called Steve; Phats and Small’s ubiquitous Turn Around; and No 1 singles, Modjo’s Lady and Eric Prydz’s Call on Me among them.

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Katy Perry found me my first friends – they were online, and in Brasil

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Finding devotees on the other side of the world let me escape from school, though my misbegotten responsibility soon became too much like hard work

Raising a child is always a burden – though not all mums are terrorised by their pre-schooler’s obsession with the video for Hung Up by Madonna. I will never forget my mother’s exasperation as the song popped up again and again on MTV: the sound of a clock counting down to reveal Abba arpeggios recast in a nu-disco reverie. I was a four-year-old boy thrashing around on the living room floor, mimicking Madge’s arm rolls and hip thrusts. An undignified spectacle? Perhaps, but one my mother invited as she allowed me to steep in the music TV of the mid-2000s.

As I grew into an awkward, introverted child, that parade of fleeting images and sounds became tangible. All the divas, once interchangeable vessels for catchy tunes, came to life. Kylie Minogue, Kanye West or Rihanna: each was their own glitzy, magnetic brand and accompanying legion. I figured I had to enlist in a pop army as well: the burgeoning, cartoony Katy Perry seemed like a sure bet. While the faux-sapphist I Kissed a Girl had failed to evangelise me, the dance-pop froth of California Gurls engulfed my summer of 2010. The pirated MP3 file (thanks, Dad) fed my curiosity about the forthcoming Teenage Dream, the first album I would experience in real time.

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On my radar: Brett Anderson’s cultural highlights

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The Suede frontman on his latest musical discoveries, the brilliance of Michael Clark and the enduring appeal of mudlarking by the Thames

Born in Sussex in 1967, Brett Anderson founded alternative rock band Suede in 1989 with then-girlfriend Justine Frischmann and childhood friend Mat Osman. Billed by Melody Maker as “the best new band in Britain”, Suede released five albums including their self-titled debut and Coming Up, before disbanding in 2003. Anderson went on to front the Tears and release four solo albums. In 2010 Suede reformed and released a further three albums, the latest of which is 2018’s The Blue Hour. Anderson will perform with Charles Hazlewood and Paraorchestra as part of the Gŵyl 2021 festival, 6-7 March.

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Kim Kardashian and Kanye West file for divorce

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The reality TV and rap superstar couple known as Kimye are parting ways after almost seven years of marriage, following reports a split was ‘imminent’

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are getting a divorce after almost seven years of marriage.

The reality TV superstar, 40, filed for divorce from the rapper, 43, on Friday in Los Angeles, court sources confirmed to the AP, and is seeking joint legal and physical custody of their four children, daughters North, seven years old, and Chicago, two, and sons Saint, five, and Psalm, 19 months.

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Britney Spears: another pop princess trapped in a man-made fairytale

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One contributor is notably absent from the new film about Britney: herself. But from Rihanna to Beyoncé to Taylor Swift, female stars have always struggled to tell their stories

In the closing song of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, we are invited to ponder the question: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” It is a powerful message about legacy and ownership, as relevant to any modern public figure as it is about one of America’s founding fathers.

I think about this lyric whenever my mind strays to Britney Spears, who has found her life back under the microscope following the release of the documentary Framing Britney Spears. The story the film chooses to tell is contextualised by what we now understand as the rampant misogyny of the mid-to-late 00s, painting an empathic portrait of a woman who had not previously found much sympathy in the mainstream.

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‘You can smell the sweat and hair gel’: the best nightclub scenes from culture

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Writers and artists including Róisín Murphy, Tiffany Calver and Sigala on the art that transports them to the dancefloor during lockdown

There have been many notable nightclubs in film history. The Blue Angel in the Marlene Dietrich movie; the Copacabana in Goodfellas, accessible to privileged wiseguys via the kitchen; the Slow Club in Blue Velvet, with the emotionally damaged star turn Isabella Rossellini singing the song of the same name.

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Dionne Warwick’s greatest tracks – ranked!

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As the soul legend is nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, we pick her 20 greatest songs from her 60s collaborations with Burt Bacharach to her later power ballads

The live album A Man and A Woman is both delightful and slightly odd: Warwick dueting with Isaac Hayes, who had just had a hit with a paen to troilism called Moonlight Lovin’ (Ménage à Trois). Its solitary single isn’t a medley, more an attempt to bind two songs together as a call-and-response. It works.

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Rihanna angers Hindus with ‘disrespectful’ Ganesha pendant

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Comments on singer’s Instagram account say wearing likeness of god is cultural appropriation

The singer Rihanna has angered the Hindu community with a “disrespectful” Instagram picture in which she wears a diamond-studded pendant featuring the Hindu god Ganesha.

Commenters on her Instagram account have called the wearing of the likeness of the god around her neck cultural appropriation.

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