Music_test.txt

This survey of the music of the post-Windrush generation is an effervescent mix of calypso, patois poetry, jazz and joropo, but with poignant undertones Trinidadian calypso musician Aldwyn Roberts, AKA Lord Kitchener. Exuberance … Trinidadian calypsonian Aldwyn Roberts, AKA Lord Kitchener. Photograph: Ron Burton/Getty Images Creole languages and culture can be loosely defined as those that have been mixed: a natural blending of influences over time to create a new hybridity. Much of this mixing has historically been a consequence of colonial oppression, and a response to unwanted and newfound circumstances. Yet through the trauma come new forms of resilience and creativity: these are the building blocks of Honest Jon’s London Is the Place for Me compilations. Charting the recordings of West Indians and west Africans in London following the first waves of immigration to Britain after the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, the compilations provide a tantalising glimpse into changing musical cultures: Trinidadian steel bands performing at carnival, patois poetry and jazz-inflected calypso. Volume 7 has a diverse mix of styles from calypso to Jamaican mento, west African palm-wine music and South American joropo. Part ethnomusicography and part mixtape, the disc’s 20 tracks make for a joyous listening experience, encompassing vocalist Louise Bennett’s patios Christmas song Bongo Man,the plaintive jazz stylings of Mississippi-born Marie Bryant, and the propulsive, clattering percussiveness of the Nigerian Union Rhythm Group. But it is Volume 8 – a collection of recordings made by calypso king Lord Kitchener between 1948 and 1962, when he returned to Trinidad from London – that is the highlight of the series. Kitchener arrived on the Windrush and wrote the song that gives this compilation series its title, which became the anthem to immigrant assimilation. His 24-track disc includes lesser known yet no less exuberant numbers, such as No More Taxi, Alfonso in Town and Life Begins at Forty. Beneath the effervescence of the instrumentation and his sprightly delivery is a longing for a sense of home. Listening to this music now, in the context of the continued mistreatment of the Windrush generation, gives it an added poignancy. It is clear that this creolisation, this mixing of culture, is still not truly valued. Yet without it, cultures stagnate and we would lose the rich offerings on show in this fantastic compilation. Also out this month Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti delivers a subdued neoclassical debut, Pies Sobre la Tierra. Using just her own cello playing, stretched and twisted through electronic filters, Fratti creates a convincing soundscape that is at turns cinematic in its scope (El Sol Sigue) and ambiently eerie (Ignora). Yellow Magic Orchestra collaborator Akiko Yano also reissues her 1980 double album Gohan Ga Dekitayo. Fizzing synth-pop abounds, with Yano’s undulating arrangement of the YMO classic Tong Poo a clear highlight. Pan-African collective Les Amazones d’Afrique release their second LP, Amazones Power, enlisting a roster of some of the continent’s most exciting female talent, such as Malian rapper Ami Yerewolo and vocalist Niariu, for 12 tracks of incisive, groove-heavy protest music tackling issues ranging from FGM to forced marriage.
As revellers head to the Noorderslag festival, more artists are finding success with their native tongue – at home and abroad Lil’ Kleine & Ronnie Flex Lil’ Kleine & Ronnie Flex enjoyed success in Germany with their track Drank & Drugs. Photograph: Dimitri Hakke/Redferns The major stars in the Dutch music scene have rarely worn their nationality on their sleeves. It is difficult to imagine No Limit by 2 Unlimited or the Vengaboys’ enduring eurodance track Boom Boom Boom Boom achieving quite the same success in the artists’ native language. As with Nederpop, a genre of music that enjoyed its moment under the disco-lights in the 1960s and 1970s, the stars seeking international success have generally sung in English or dispensed with words altogether; Dutch was left to the folk singers. Dutch-born Eddie Van Halen, who moved to California with his family as a child, was never likely to insist that his eponymous band sang in his mother tongue. But now, with a little trepidation, 2020 is being talked up as something of a watershed year. This Saturday, 43% of the musicians performing at the Noorderslag festival, in Groningen, considered the barometer of local pop music, will be performing in Dutch. That compares to 17.5% 20 years ago. Radio stations are also said be playing more Dutch-language music – and it is also finding an audience outside the Netherlands. Trouw newspaper this week noted that the Dutch hip-hop artist Bizzey had recently enjoyed a hit in Turkey, local rappers Lil ‘Kleine and Ronnie Flex had enjoyed success in Germany with their track Drank & Drugs, and the US music bible, Rolling Stone, had tipped Gloria by Clean Pete as one of the best Christmas albums of 2019. While careful not to lose their heads, Trouw reflected on those successes with a headline asking: “Dutch-language music is hot. Excuse me, hot. How is that possible?” The newspaper surmised that the sudden popularity might have something to do with the greater ease with which listeners can find Dutch music in the era of streaming. They asked whether it could also be part of a counter-reaction to the internationalisation of music and culture, citing the phenomenon of McDonald’s McKroket (a burger with a breaded beef patty in the middle) as evidence of a growing nostalgia for local ways. A sterner test of whether Dutch-language pop has a chance on the international stage will take place in Rotterdam in May, however. After last year’s Eurovision victory for Dutch singer Duncan de Moor, professionally known as Duncan Laurence, with his English-language song Arcade, Rotterdam will host the competition. Jeangu Macrooy, 26, who moved to the Netherlands from Suriname in 2014, has been selected to represent his country. Macrooy’s song, and more importantly the language in which he will sing it, are yet to be revealed. Whatever the reason for the outbreak of Dutch-language music, the artists finding success with it offer a simple explanation for its return to the pop genre. Jeanne Rouwendaal, a singer-songwriter in the Dutch pop band Wies told Trouw that she felt that her music was only truly authentic in her mother tongue. “I can express more character in my native language”, she said. “I come from the Zaan region [in the north]. You can tell by my accent and use of words. In English, that all falls away.”
Canadian pop singer Justin Bieber has told fans that he is battling Lyme disease. Bieber, 25, posted a message on Instagram saying that he had been diagnosed with the bacterial infection and that it had been “a rough couple of years”. However, he vowed to be “back and better than ever”. Bieber told his 124 million followers: “I’ve been recently diagnosed with Lyme disease, not only that but had a serious case of chronic mono which affected my skin, brain function, energy, and overall health. “These things will be explained further in a docu series I’m putting on YouTube shortly.. you can learn all that I’ve been battling and OVERCOMING!!” He added: “It’s been a rough couple years but getting the right treatment that will help treat this so far incurable disease and I will be back and better than ever NO CAP.” Bieber revealed last month that he is to star in a documentary series which will give fans a look at the making of his first new album in more than four years. Lyme disease can cause a range of debilitating symptoms from fatigue and joint pain to heart problems and partial paralysis. The disease has struck numerous celebrities in recent years. In 2015 it was revealed model Bella Hadid had the disease; the same year that singer Avril Lavigne was also diagnosed with it. In 2016 actor Kris Kristofferson discovered the memory loss he had been suffering from was due to the disease.
British fans bought or streamed the equivalent of more than 150m albums last year as music consumption in the UK hit its highest level since 2006, driven by the success of artists including Lewis Capaldi, Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande. Across all formats – including digital downloads and streams from subscription services as well as CDs, vinyl and cassettes – music fans purchased or streamed the equivalent of 154m albums in 2019. This is the most since music consumption hit the equivalent of 161.4m albums in 2006. Lewis Capaldi was the most streamed artist of the year, with his album Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent and the single Someone You Loved topping the charts. In 2006 the bestselling album was Snow Patrol’s Eyes Open, and Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy was the top selling single. The annual report from the music industry body the BPI highlights the extent to which the rise of legal streaming services from Spotify and Apple to Amazon and Deezer continue to be the salvation of artists. Sales of the once mighty CD plummeted 26.5% to 23.5m last year, less than half the number sold just three years ago, to account for just 15% of the total. Meanwhile the equivalent of 114m albums of music were streamed this year, an uplift of more than a quarter compared with 2018, as consumer habits continue to drive the music industry from a physical to a digital listening experience. Music fans listened to a record 114bn tracks on streaming services last year, with every 1,000 tracks streamed considered to be the equivalent of one real-world album sale. Streaming accounted for three-quarters of all album equivalent sales in the UK last year, up from less than a quarter four years ago – with physical albums still accounting for the majority of sales. However, the digital revolution has not wiped out traditional music listening altogether, due to a revival in popularity of the oldest formats. Vinyl sales hit 4.3m in 2019, the 12th consecutive year of growth, as the popularity of the record reached levels not seen since the 1980s. Liam Gallagher’s Why Me? Why Not was the most successful vinyl album of the year. John Lewis said the vinyl revival had helped turntables become a popular Christmas gift with a 400% increase in sales between November and December. The retailer, which sells a range of models from brands including Audio Technica, Sony and Ion Max priced from £69 to £179, said it has seen a 25% increase in sales of turntables over the past three years. The vinyl revival has also rubbed off on the cassette, which by 2012 had all but disappeared save for use by police for taping interviews. While cassette sales remain tiny at 80,400, they almost doubled year-on-year, enjoying their biggest year of sales since 2004. Cassette sales have grown in each of the last seven years. Robbie Williams’s festive season release, The Christmas Present, has become the fastest-selling cassette album since compilation Now 52 in July 2002. “It is wonderful to see the continued growth of vinyl and the resurrection of the cassette,” said Vanessa Higgins, chief executive of the independent label Regent Street Records. “It shows fans still love a physical, tangible music artefact in their hands.” While overall CD sales continue to plummet, the desire for a collectible product continues to fuel strong sales of premium-quality special editions and box sets. Last year, Queen’s Platinum Collection sold well over 100,000 copies on CD, a timely release which received a sales boost thanks to the Academy Award-winning biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Deluxe anniversary releases of Fleetwood Mac and the Beatles collections also sold well. “British music proved once again in 2019 that it has a bright future,” said Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI and annual Brit awards. “Strong demand for streaming music and vinyl boosted music consumption to levels not seen for 13 years.”
Mariah Carey’s Twitter account appeared to have been hacked late Tuesday afternoon, sharing numerous racist slurs and comments with the singer’s 21.4 million followers on the platform. It’s unclear who’s behind the hack, and the pop star did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Most of the tweets published on Tuesday afternoon were quickly deleted. Many verged on the nonsensical and appeared to troll the singer’s fans. “Personally I don’t think racism is real, it’s just pussy boy talk,” one tweet read. “Eminem has a small penis,” read another. (Mariah Carey and rapper Eminem once had a very public feud, in which he claimed to have slept with the singer.) Twitter users were quick to jump in and deliver their own commentary on the bizarre situation. “Hacking Mariah Carey is a federal offense so I hope it was worth it!” one user wrote. Mariah Carey has become a renewed focal point of pop culture in recent weeks, through her record-breaking achievements on the Billboard Chart. The singer’s modern classic All I Want For Christmas hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time this month – 25 years after its original release. And on Monday, Billboard announced Carey is projected to become the first artist to have number-one hits in four consecutive decades, when All I Want For Christmas tops the 4 January 2020 Hot 100 list. “What’s a decade?” the singer jokingly tweeted after the news broke, when she was allegedly still in control of her account.
Universal Music Group, the home of stars including Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and the Beatles, has sold a 10% stake to a consortium led by the Chinese tech company Tencent in a deal valuing the world’s largest music company at €30bn (€25bn). UMG’s parent company, Vivendi, which is controlled by the French billionaire Vincent Bolloré, has also agreed that the Tencent-led consortium has the option to buy another stake of up to 10% at the same price by 15 January 2021. The deal, which follows protracted talks that began last summer, increases Tencent’s international expansion. The company owns a 7.5% stake in the Swedish streaming platform Spotify, and the deal will help Universal Music to expand in Asia. Vivendi said Tencent Music Entertainment, Tencent’s streaming subsidiary, which is listed on the New York stock exchange, will also buy a minority stake in Universal Music’s operation across China. “Vivendi is very happy with the arrival of Tencent and its co-investors,” Vivendi said in a statement. “They will enable UMG to further develop in the Asian market.” Vivendi and Tencent would not name other members of the consortium other than to say it included “certain global financial investors”. Separately, Vivendi said it had entered new talks just before Christmas over the potential sale of an additional minority stake in UMG, at a price “which would at least be identical” to the deal with Tencent, with another unnamed investor or investors. Following the announcement Sir Lucian Grainge, the chairman and chief executive of UMG, emailed staff to reassure them that the deal would not result in Tencent exerting any influence over the day-to-day running of the music company. “With the exception of additional resources to further advance our strategy, everything else will remain the same: our strategic vision; our company, label and business unit names; our locations; and of course, our outstanding people,” he said. “This is an exciting development reflecting a strong validation of our business strategy, our incredible team and your excellent work.” Sign up to the daily Business Today email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk The French media conglomerate has been angling to sell a stake in UMG for the last 18 months to cash in on the music industry revival which is being driven by the streaming revolution, in turn led by services including Apple, Spotify, Amazon and Deezer. Last year, global music revenues grew at their fastest rate in more than two decades. Worldwide, recorded music revenues surged 9.7% to $19.1bn (£14.6bn) in 2018, the fastest rate of growth since at least 1997 when the Oasis album Be Here Now topped the UK album chart. It is the highest level of income earned by the music industry since 2006, when CD sales accounted for more than 80% of global revenues and streaming income was virtually non-existent.
Little is more unifying than a crisis. Attendees of this year’s Falls Festival found themselves face-to-face with that on the weekend, when the music festival’s Lorne site — the largest of Falls’ four locations across Australia — was forced to evacuate due to a severe weather warning. The dry and heavily wooded area, classified as a high risk for falling trees and bushfires, already had 9,000 attendees onsite and was expecting more arrivals ahead of New Year’s Eve celebrations on Tuesday evening. American pop star Halsey was the headline act, as well as performances from popular international artists Vampire Weekend, Playboi Carti, and Lewis Capaldi. That idyllic pop-rap-indie utopia did not come to pass – the site emptied, and would-be punters weathered the 40-plus degree heat from safer areas. There was a silver lining, though: local and international artists who would have played the cancelled festival put on last-minute replacement shows in Melbourne, and proceeds from many went to the state’s Country Fire Authority (CFA). At least a dozen Falls replacement shows have been organised in the space of 48 hours. Melbourne’s inner city was flooded on Sunday evening with gigs from G Flip at the Northcote Social Club, Baker Boy at Brunswick’s Howler, Peking Duk at the Esplanade Hotel, Holy Holy and Ali Barter at Richmond’s Leadbeater, RAT!hammock at Collingwood’s Gasometer, and more. Acts including WAAX, Lime Cordiale, These New South Whales, Bad//Dreems, Cry Club, and Teenage Dads are scheduled to perform in the coming days. Living in the Australian climate means being constantly aware of threats like bushfires – threats that are only increasing. The instinctive support of these artists for first responders and crisis teams speaks to that awareness. But it is especially powerful to see international acts like Halsey, who organised a replacement for her Falls headline set at Melbourne’s 2,000-capacity Forum Theatre, and British punk-pop singer Yungblud, who nearly overran Melbourne’s Tote Hotel with teens upon announcement of his under-18s replacement show, act so quickly and so passionately in support of both fans and the CFA. At the Forum, where a queue wrapped around the entirety of its block for most of Sunday evening, Halsey made it clear that her replacement show was a fundraiser first and foremost, acknowledging the efforts of the CFA before addressing the crowd during her set. “I want to thank the amazing people who are working to relieve these fires,” the 25-year-old told the near-capacity venue. “We are doing everything in our power to raise proceeds for them.” A mere 12 hours earlier, Halsey had taken to her Instagram stories to assure fans she would try to put on a show; she ended up delivering a full production that gave priority to displaced festival punters. There is a distinctly bittersweet irony in seeing a visiting popstar respond more quickly and more rigorously to the threat of Australia’s bushfires than, say, the country’s own prime minister. The frantically organised nature of many of the Falls replacement shows gave them a livewire energy. Immense demand from the Yungblud’s fans, for example, proved challenging for Tote’s limited staff. The under-18s show was announced, then swiftly cancelled, then reinstated with a strict set of rules, including a chaperoning system and network of rigorous ID checks. A hugely entertaining series of videos on the pub’s Instagram page depicts scores of teens lining up outside the venue, clamoring after Yungblud’s car, and swarming the young star as he exited the venue. Bridget Hustwaite, the host of Triple J’s Good Nights program, was meant to attend Falls Festival and has been documenting the replacement shows springing up across Melbourne. “The current fire threats have been difficult for everyone but it’s through these tough times that we see people rise,” she told Guardian Australia via email. “Fans forked out hundreds of dollars for their Falls tickets, drove hours to and from the festival site [and] still showed up to these replacement gigs in Melbourne with massive smiles on their faces.” Despite the thrill of these once-in-a-lifetime shows, though, a troubling question remains. Temperatures are only rising, and the risk of rampant bushfires increases each year. A lack of live music is far from the most pressing issue we face, but if there’s one thing we’re learning it’s that climate crisis will affect every aspect of our lives. The summer music festival has become something of a teenage rite of passage in Australia, but with the climate prognosis only getting worse, how long have they got?
In this series writers celebrate a person who changed their lives. Suzanne Moore thanks a singer who has transformed his rage into something like prayer Iggy Pop performing at the Barbican -jazz festival. Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty Images Iggy Pop performing at the Barbican -jazz festival. Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty Images Dear Mr Pop, I had tickets for your gig at the Barbican jazz festival but warned my mate: “I don’t know how much jazz it’s going to be. Maybe it’s crooning. Anyway, it’s still Iggy.” Of course I have seen you before, a thousand years ago, and I took it all for granted. Didn’t we all? When I lived in America, you were sleeping on the couch of the barman I worked with and, I hate to report, I am not sure you were the politest of house guests. We saw you in Baton Rouge with a lot of people screaming “faggot” and you taunted them by flaunting your enviable curves, as the Daily Mail might say. Anyway, now it is 2019 and you are, amazingly, still here. Then my pregnant daughter calls: “It’s started Mum, I’m in labour.” “Oh God,” I say, “I’m going to see Iggy Pop.” “Go,” she says, “it’ll be a while yet.” I speak to my other daughter: “I’m going to the gig but I’m not going to have a drink or anything.” “Have a drink Mum,” she says. Where did these brilliant children come from, I wonder. I wonder a lot about living and dying, too, as I lost a dear friend recently. Then I wonder about the Barbican, as it’s all so proper. Perhaps you, Mr Pop, will do some poetry and we will clap politely and act like grownups for once. Then there you are. Your face like carved amber. The limp, the scoliosis, always smaller than your huge, striding attitude. The voice, deeper, darker than ever. Yes, it is a little jazzy. Then there is some Stooges and then you mention Bowie and I remember the story of how you wrote Nightclubbing in 20 minutes, and he wanted a proper drummer and you wanted a cheap drum machine. And we are back in a club in Kreuzberg, and you are everywhere on stage. I think of loss. As you leap and pose, who knows if it’s sex or tai chi or swimming that keeps you this way? All I know is I’ve never seen anyone who loves his audience the way you do and we love you back. You have transformed all that rage into something like prayer. Who knows how old you are now, as you sing of death and survival, as you head into the crowd: “Turn up the house lights,” you say. “I wanna see you.” You bathe in the light. “Do not go gentle into the good night,” you tell us. It’s like you don’t want to leave the stage and we don’t want you to. My grandson was born a day or so later. He waited. He let me get to see you and for that I am grateful. Of course. But to you … well, thank you for kicking against the pricks. For knowing about death but showing us how to be the most alive a person can be. Thank you for showing up. Always. You sure hypnotised this chicken.
It’s that time in the decade when people like me – professional monitors of mass culture – look back at the preceding 10 years and try to make sense of it. Give it a shape. Problem is, I’m finding that it all feels a bit foggy and formless. The chronology of the 2010s is jumbled and indistinct, its peaks and landmarks hard to pinpoint. Without consulting end-of-year lists, I’m not even sure I could tell you what came out in the 2010s and in what sequence. All that remains are faint after-images of things that were utterly absorbing at the time of listening or watching, but seemed swiftly to vanish into the void of the recent past. I binged my way avidly through shows such as Sex Education or BoJack Horseman or Atlanta, then promptly forgot their very existence, until the startling reminder of a new season being announced. There is always something new to watch, after all: an endless, relentless wave of pleasures lined up in the infinite Netflix queue. The reason that it feels like nothing happened in the 2010s is that too much happened. Each cultural landmark got instantly effaced by the onrush of the next, and the next. This memory-erosion effect is one reason why it feels like something’s gone awry with our sense of time. While the clock and the calendar continue to plod forward in their steadfast and remorseless way, what you could call “culture-time” feels like it’s become unmoored and meandering. That process had already begun in the first decade of the 21st century, with file-sharing and YouTube creating a vast, disordered open-access archive of past pop culture, that mingled promiscuously with current releases to create an effect of atemporality. This dizzying power of total and instant recall went into hyperdrive during the 2010s, thanks to streamers such as Spotify, Netflix and Amazon. Rather than simply usurping the place of the old mass-media monoculture, these gigantic platforms have a curious effect of simultaneously unifying and fracturing. Instead of inviting consumers to tune into a shared cultural experience at a designated time, they encourage individualised trajectories through teeming repositories of art and entertainment. Slowly but surely, streaming is killing the idea of a mainstream. Like Canute defying the tide of history, Daft Punk attempted a kind of monoculture reenactment on their 2013 album Random Access Memories. Renouncing “digital love” in favour of analogue production and “real” musicianship (human drumming!), they staged a homage to the lost golden age of record-making that had resulted in blockbusters such as Rumours and Off the Wall. The duo’s promotional campaign pointedly made use of old-fashioned pre-internet techniques like billboards and television ads. The entire project ached with nostalgia not so much for the monoculture as for monotemporality: “the event”, the mass synchronised experience of “the whole world” ardently focused on a single cultural artefact, from movies such as Stars Wars and Saturday Night Fever to records like Sgt Pepper and Thriller. The roll-out and the release succeeded in dominating public attention and critical discourse. Get Lucky ruled the radio for a year and Daft Punk cleaned up at the Grammys. Yet Random Access Memories rapidly and thoroughly evacuated itself from popular memory, to the point where it has barely featured in all the end-of-decade list-making. The monoculture and that particular sense of shared temporality has not disappeared altogether. But like a dwarf star it has shrunk, and its power to irradiate the lives of everyone is much weaker. Even the astronomically famous have had to resort to ruses to commandeer public attention – like Beyoncé with her surprise release, in December 2013, of a self-titled “visual album”. But this kind of media ambush – designed to cut through the noise, like a radio station with a very powerful signal drowning out its rivals – only works for the already famous, those whose celebrity capital was built up during the earlier monoculture. For anybody smaller, it would be an act of promotional suicide. It feels like there are fewer household names, more cult figures – and the gulf between the universally famous and the known-to-just-some grows wider and wider. A discussion about music with an old friend or a new acquaintance can go quite a long way before you find something that you have both heard. Not only there is a sprawling span of contemporary niche sounds and micro-genres, but there are several generations of ageing stars and tenacious fringe figures still out there gigging and recording, Meanwhile, the reissue industry constantly rescues obscure artists from oblivion and repositions them as deserving of attention and ear-time, while the amateur archivists of YouTube and album-sharing sites mop up anybody and everybody else remaining with a scintilla of significance. Over the last decade, television has grown equally profuse and amorphous. For a moment at the turn of the 21st century, the culturally centralising role of TV seemed to undergo a renaissance in the form of the Golden Age of prestige drama and innovative comedy. Indie-film auteurs, blocked from a blockbuster-obsessed Hollywood in which superheroes and CGI ruled, charged into the small-screen medium, which now welcomed risky material and formal innovation. Appointment TV, the punctual convergence of large audiences for the latest episode of shows such as The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, kept alive the idea of the public as unitary bloc whose aesthetic horizons could be collectively expanded. But then came streaming, with its vastly enlarged menu of options and its flexibility of use. You could binge an entire series in one go, or catch up with it long after everyone else. Aware of the dangers of dithering and drowning posed by the very surfeit of choices they offered, streamers devised algorithms to “surface” programs that might appeal to your habitual tastes. But the downside of this attunement to the individual consumer is that fewer viewers are tuned into the same shows. Streaming represents the next level in a general digital-era tendency: consumer control of time becomes vastly more personalised, but that experience of time becomes more brittle. The ability to stop and restart the flow of cultural information proves to be an irresistible temptation: pausing for a call of nature or a conversational digression, or to rewind a bit of knotty dialogue. Netflix is toying with a new feature that will allow viewers to watch programmes at 1.5x speed, allowing consumers to keep up with the challenging surfeit of must-see TV. The idea of Spotify introducing a similar function seems unlikely: while a TV narrative could be compressed without loss of information, in a profound sense music simply is a particular experience of time, so altering its rate of flow would be to change its essence. But who knows? The challenge of too much music and too little time could drive a music fan to desperate measures. Research suggests that average song lengths have decreased significantly in response to streaming, while canny writers and producers are placing the chorus at the start of singles (such as High Hopes by Panic! At the Disco) to hook browsing listeners instantly. The rise of TikTok as a teenage go-to discovery engine for new music plays into this syndrome, with its 15-second fan-created videos that turn songs into bite-size samples at the pop supermarket. A sense of sanity-endangering overload was already apparent in the 2000s. The shift between the first decade of the 21st century and the 2010s can be partly conveyed by the contrast between “torrents” and “streaming”. Both terms evoke the new liquidity of cultural products freed from solid form and turned into pure information. Visiting torrent sites or filesharing platforms was a purposeful activity, though – like going to an MP3 retailer such as iTunes except without a financial transaction taking place. Legal and illegal downloading alike was still tethered to the notion of music ownership, even if the collection was now infinitesimally inconspicuous, crammed into a hard drive or that antique object, the iPod. Streaming seems less active, a steady state that turns music into a utility, something on tap – like water. Where obsessive accumulation of solid-form music or immaterial files involved passion and even an element of pathology, streaming breaks with the hunter-collector psychology. It’s like radio, except there’s little or no public dimension. Occasionally, your streaming selection will coincide with large numbers of other people – the waning flickers of the monoculture drawing you all to the same spot. But mostly your journeys through the library of sound are solitary and asocial. “Scattered and shattered” seems like the right shorthand for both the disintegrating monoculture and the sensation of living with the overload of options (attention stretched every-which-way, frankly knackered by keeping up with it). But perhaps there are worse fates than drowning in a flood of great entertainment and popular art. And new possibilities emerge out of the rubble of the mainstream. The 2010s has seen the rise of subcultures that exist largely or entirely online, as divergent as vaporwave, ASMR, UK drill, and makeup tutorials, but all of them nesting within huge platforms like YouTube or Bandcamp. Something like audio blogs or DIY radio, podcasts have become the focus of new communities. And the slow collapse of a centralising and synchronised common culture has opened up the space for a profusion of micro-scenes, each running on its own timeline. In this flourishing post-geographical world of “local” cultures not tied to location, small is bountiful and significance doesn’t need to be universal to matter.
The last time we encountered Marshall Mathers III – on 2018’s Kamikaze, an album that arrived, like its successor, entirely without warning – he seemed to be in the process of repositioning himself. Hip-hop’s former enfant terrible, a man who made a career out of saying things that even his most nihilistic peers would consider beyond the pale, had reinvented himself as rap’s grumpy dad, baffled and horrified at what the genre had become. He spent most of Kamikaze carrying on like rap’s answer to Bagpuss curmudgeon-in-chief Professor Yaffle, forever rolling his eyes and tutting and telling the mice on the mouse organ that they were doing it all wrong and their face tattoos looked stupid. Listening to a man in his late 40s complaining about the youngsters’ taste in music is seldom terribly edifying, but he gave it his best shot, deploying all the technical skill he once used to make saying the worst things imaginable sound like the most exciting thing in the world on rubbishing Lil Pump and Charlamagne Tha God. In fact, perhaps he gave it too good a shot: the most immediately striking thing about its follow-up is that it features the sound of Slim Shady apologising, something that would have once seemed no more likely than Eminem releasing an album of earnest acoustic love ballads or being appointed secretary of the interior. But there it is, a mea culpa for “misplacing my anger” and saying “dumb shit” about Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt, both of whom he attacked, the former with a homophobic slur, on Kamikaze. “I shoulda just aimed for the fake ones and traitorous punks,” he admits, adding, very Eminem-ishly, that said nameless fakes and traitorous punks are “cunts” who “can get fucked with 800 motherfucking vibrators at once”. The fact that this comes in the middle of a track called No Regrets indicates the confusion at the heart of Music to Be Murdered By, an album that speaks loudly and regularly about Emimen’s struggle to find his place within today’s hip-hop landscape and adjust to life on the admittedly multi-million-selling sidelines. “Once I was played in rotation at every radio station,” he protests on opener Premonition. “Instead of us being credited for longevity and being able to keep it up this long at this level, we get told we’ll never be what we were.” What to do? Take on board developments in the genre, slather on the Auto-Tune and offer your benediction to younger artists by way of guest slots? Mock developments in the genre and angrily reassert your bona fides, with the accompanying implicit suggestion that things have gone steadily downhill since your days as middle America’s favourite folk devil? Music to Be Murdered By does both, finding room for features from Young MA and the recently deceased Juice WRLD alongside suggestions that their contemporaries can’t rap properly (“They can’t even figure out where their words should hit the kick and the snare”) and Yah Yah. The latter is a musically thrilling whirlwind of electronic noise and a veritable bonanza of 90s nostalgia: its hook sampled from Busta Rhymes’ Woo-Ha, its chorus borrowing from Wu-Tang and Ice Cube, its list of guests including Q-Tip and the Roots’ Black Thought. “My era,” Q-Tip cries, “my era so original.” It’s a state of affairs compounded by the fact that Eminem’s whole persona is predicated on being an angry, disenfranchised outsider: what do you find to get mad about when you’re a sober 47-year-old with a net worth of $230m, so successful that you “sell like 4 mil when [you] put out a bad album”? There’s the critics of course, who come in for their usual battering, but he’s been there before, umpteen times. It’s hard not to feel the same when Eminem attempts the old saying-the-unsayable by making gags about the Manchester bombing on Unaccommodating and poking fun at #MeToo on Those Kinda Nights: the former has certainly generated angry headlines, which is why you suspect it’s there in the first place, but, as on Kamikaze, those moments are marked by a distinct sense of a man going through the motions. Elsewhere, Eminem ends up reaching back into his past for inspiration: Those Kinda Nights details the hedonistic heyday of D12; Leave Heaven and Stepdad return to Mathers’ miserable childhood; In Too Deep and Never Love Again pick over a complex co-dependent relationship that sounds not unlike his marriage to Kim Scott. If Music to Be Murdered By covers a lot of old ground, it does so in considerable style. It’s a stronger album musically than its predecessor, which may or may not have something to do with Mathers’ most celebrated collaborator, Dr Dre: his name isn’t in the credits, but gets mentioned so many times in the lyrics it seems safe to assume he’s putting his two cents in somewhere behind the scenes. The wiry synths of the haunting Little Engine and You Gon’ Learn’s gripping, chaotic stew of vocal samples and juddering drums are both unequivocally fantastic, while In Too Deep’s monstrous, clattering beat is only spoiled by an awkwardly welded-on pop R&B chorus. In fact, choruses are a bit of a problem throughout: Ed Sheeran does his best to sound part of the drugged-out party action on Those Kinda Nights, but it’s clearly not his milieu, while Stepdad’s lumbering rap-rock crossover brings back grim memories of nu-metal. But the smattering of musical flaws is easy to overlook if you concentrate on Mathers’ voice. If the passing of time has robbed him of his place as part of hip-hop’s steering committee, it’s done nothing whatsoever to blunt his talent as an MC, the sharpness of his puns or the brilliance of his wordplay. Music to Be Murdered By offers one virtuoso performance after another: delivery that’s both warp-speed and perfectly enunciated, constant shifts in tempo and emphasis. The best thing here is Darkness, a genuinely chilling attempt to view the 2017 mass shooting at the Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest music festival through the eyes of its perpetrator, Stephen Paddock. On paper, it looks like another nihilistic sick gag, but it isn’t. It’s a stark, chilling portrait of a mind unravelling, filled with grimly telling details: the shooter’s concern that the festival is underattended, his proud touting of the gun licence and lack of prior convictions, his realisation that the notoriety he craves will be fleeting, because mass shootings have become a regular occurrence. As a demonstration that Eminem is still capable of being a potent force, regardless of changing times and fashions, it works perfectly.
Record companies might disagree, but exclusives, eligibility algorithms, bundling and ‘streaming farms’ are threatening to ruin the Top 40 French Montana; Ellie Goulding; Nicki Minaj; Mariah Carey. Sales force or farce? (from left) French Montana; Ellie Goulding; Nicki Minaj; Mariah Carey. Composite: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty; Dylan Martinez/Reuters; Jason Merritt/Radarpics/Rex/Shutterstock; Angela Weiss The singles charts have always been a bit of a shambles, but recently they have been upgraded to “hot mess” status. Take Ellie Goulding scoring the post-Christmas No 1 with her cover of Joni Mitchell’s River, despite it being an Amazon exclusive, through a combination of playlist carpet-bombing and the season’s perennial heavy hitters from Wham! and Mariah Carey having their eligible streaming numbers effectively halved to stop tracks more than three years old clogging the chart arteries. It is not only the UK facing a chart crisis. In the US, French Montana’s Writing on the Wall has become a surprise hit amid accusations of industrialised fake streaming, where stream “farms” have thousands of devices hammering the first 31 seconds of a track on Spotify or YouTube so they get registered as a play. Then there is Billboard having to tighten its chart rules around “album-bundling”, where acts sell CDs or downloads rolled in with tickets or merchandise to juice their first-week sales. The practice went public in a 2018 beef between Nicki Minaj and Travis Scott, where the former accused the latter of beating her to the US No 1 by gaming the charts – even though Minaj was also playing the bundle game. It is a long way from the straightforward chart-rigging of the past, when unscrupulous sorts sent teams around the UK in vans to buy up multiple copies of singles from chart-return shops, or where labels issued singles on 10 or more formats (cassette, CD, 12-inch, seven-inch, picture disc etc) until the charts were shamed into restricting the number of eligible options. That all now feels like a simpler time. Today, chart companies are permanently scrambling to keep up with technology. Downloads, for example, were quarantined in their own chart before finally being rolled into the “grownup” chart. Streaming, however, has proven the biggest existential threat, with a complex weighting system eventually being applied, and convoluted conversion equations cooked up to arrive at sales equivalents in chart tallies where, in the UK for example, 100 streams on the paid version of Spotify, but 600 plays on the ad-supported version, “equal” a sale. What was once a hugely unscientific undertaking – the UK singles chart was born in 1952 when Maurice Kinn called up a handful of record shops and printed a Top 12 in NME – has become too scientific, and record companies forensically comb the rules for loopholes they can exploit. As music unspools in a million different ways, the Top 40 as the place to make sense of it all has had its validity shattered. The charts are now, to misquote Churchill, an algorithm wrapped in a T-shirt, inside an enigma.
Last February, Algiers released one of the most extraordinary tracks of 2019. Can the Sub_Bass Speak? was a five-minute collage of free-jazz sax, drums and sampled southern US spirituals, over which Franklin Fisher recounted the insults and misconceptions he has received as the African-American frontman of this uncategorisable group – ranging from: “You remind me of Lenny Kravitz” to, “Fuck your experience … you ain’t from the hood”. Sitting in a London cafe with his bandmate, bassist Ryan Mahan, Fisher explains that he wrote it “so that I would never have to discuss my race any more with the white media. They don’t understand what you’re doing as a person of colour in a context that is not – very reductively – black.” Algiers’ politicised lyricism and abrasive, industrial-tinged songs shaped by the musical heritage of their Atlanta, Georgia home have been misunderstood by white audiences. “This is not an R&B group, you’re not rapping, we don’t know what this is,” he repeats mockingly in the song. At least on a personal level, Can the Sub_Bass Speak? did what they needed it to. “It was like an exorcism or a purge of an anger that I’m not carrying around any more,” says Fisher. True to Fisher’s word, the topic is off the cards, leaving space to discuss There Is No Year. Algiers’ third album is an elegant progression from 2017’s The Underside of Power. That record was a stark examination of what Mahan describes as the racism and “homogenous and repressive nature of society” that he, Fisher and guitarist Lee Tesche encountered growing up in Atlanta. Drummer Matt Tong, formerly of Bloc Party, joined in 2015. Mahan says they came together to disrupt the idea “that somehow America is exceptional”. For Mahan, the only exceptional thing about it is “its violence, and getting close to meeting the Greek and Roman empires in a complete spiralling and collapse. It was: this makes us feel fucking alienated, how do we deal with it? That’s where the band comes from.” The new album was recorded after Algiers finished a world tour supporting Depeche Mode, playing stadiums one night and tiny venues in eastern European cities that most bands do not deign to visit the next. “Being in a band is like being a shark; keep moving or die,” says Fisher with a wry smile. The experience illustrates how music has changed since Depeche Mode were able to top global charts with music that is not all that dissimilar from the gothic, politicised potency of Algiers. You can hear Depeche’s influence on their new track Chaka, which mixes drum machine, shredding guitar and warm synths. Yet whereas Depeche Mode sold millions, Algiers continue to struggle commercially. “I listen to a lot of new music and not fitting in sonically gives me a feeling of dislocation,” Mahan says. “It’s been tough.” Yet, as Fisher says, their contrasting of discord and melody merely reflects what they see around them. “The political situation is complex, so the ways of speaking about it must be complex because otherwise it’s anachronistic, and that doesn’t work for me,” he says. It is what makes his band different from forebears such as Manic Street Preachers, whose music was always shaped by a simpler rock aesthetic and more orthodox politics. Fisher’s lyrics on There Is No Year were taken from a sprawling poem, an impressionistic exploration of both the American condition and the band’s personal lives, which “seemed to be always close to spiralling out of control”, he says. “Something needed to get more existential.” He called the poem Misophonia, after a psychological condition of hating certain sounds, from which he has long suffered. “As a kid I had nervous breakdowns because I thought the world was going to end,” he says. “I had a religious upbringing, and would imagine Satan as the tuner of harps, or the seventh trumpet being the most horrific supernatural sound that you could imagine, everything fucking dying.” This is not to say that Algiers are nihilists. Melody often wins out in their cocktail of prickly sounds, so while a track such as Dispossession might have lyrics about America in flames, it comes with a killer chorus and a louche swing. “There’s a larger theme of sound that’s revisited throughout the record,” says Fisher. “Sound as something that is redemptive and threatening and soothing and everything in between.” Their conversation is punctuated with dry humour, and although they are eloquent when it comes to discussing the bizarre and frequently terrifying state of the world in 2020, they are level-headed with it. “If you’re hopeful without pessimism it’s quite naive,” says Mahan, “and if you’re just pessimistic, it’s fucking cynical.” There Is No Year is released 17 January on Matador
Manchester Arena Blending thrilling theatricality with skilled musicianship, the metal megastars unite their ‘maggot’ followers against the forces of darkness Raging showman … Corey Taylor of Slipknot at Manchester Arena. Raging showman … Corey Taylor of Slipknot at Manchester Arena. Photograph: Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage It’s 21 years since Slipknot blazed out of Iowa with their eponymous debut album and a striking USP. Their horror masks tapped into the movie-viewing habits of their soon-to-be enormous audience, while their bleak, nihilistic lyrics tapped into widespread feelings of social unease, isolation, disquiet and rage. The brutal music channelled what late rock critic Lester Bangs called “the sacred power of horrible noise”: a mix of heavy metal, pummelling blast beats, elements of rap plus vintage Killing Joke and Nine Inch Nails – all sounding as if they were being put through an industrial grinder. It proved not just a recipe for world domination – they became very big, very quickly – but endurance. Last year’s chart-topping sixth album, We Are Not Your Kind, received some of the best reviews of their career. It has, however, been a bumpy ride. The music has been crassly linked to violent incidents, despite Slipknot’s vocal opposition to America’s gun culture. They remain a nine-piece, but only clown-masked percussionist Shawn Crahan (also a film director) survives from the original 1995 lineup, as members have been lost to lawsuits, a neurological disease, sackings, religious differences and an overdose (founding bassist Paul Gray died in 2010). Somehow it has all been grist to their furious mill. Opener Unsainted, from We Are Not Your Kind, explains their longevity. It’s brutally quintessential but also cleverly rebooted Slipknot, and the combination of growling frontman Corey Taylor and a (recorded) ghostly children’s choir singing, “I’ll never kill myself to save my soul” is eerily uplifting. The band’s lineup remains idiosyncratic, too: a frontman, three guitarists, a keyboard player, DJ, powerhouse drummer Jay Weinberg (the son of fabled Bruce Springsteen sticksman, Max) and two percussionists beating huge stacks of what look like luminous oil drums. Underpinning the fury is solid, skilled musicianship and trusted metal tropes: killer riffs, wailing solos and choruses that hit home with packed arenas, especially on bellow-along angry anthems Duality and Surfacing. The band are also thrillingly theatrical. Taylor’s horror mask and spattered outfit make him look as if he has stepped straight from the set of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There are fire-shooting guitars, computer graphics, conveyor belts and the two percussionists double as demonic clowns and cheerleaders. Taylor, 46, rages convincingly but is also an incorrigible showman, insisting Manchester is “one of my favourite cities in the fuckin’ world”. He said something similar in Dublin. Still, a career-spanning setlist leaves no fan disappointed as thousands of the so-called “maggots” punch the air to songs from the debut and seminal follow-up, Iowa, and more from We Are Not Your Kind. The splendid Neo Forte rocks darkly, while the innovative Solway Firth takes the sound somewhere brooding and haunting, with Gary Numan synths. Between songs, Taylor offers a glimpse of the human behind the mask, commenting on the shared “isolation” that connects his band with so many people, and touchingly referring to “the craziness in the world”: “That madness touches us but isn’t us. This is us!” Taylor roars again as band and air-punching audience unite against the world’s insanity with the defiant misanthropy of People = Shit, its title helpfully, mischievously written in huge letters above the stage. • At Newcastle Arena, 17 January. Then touring.
Relatives hit back at ‘disrespectful’ rapper over lyrics referring to terror attack Eminem performing in June 2018. Eminem performing in June 2018. Photograph: C Flanigan/WireImage Eminem has been criticised after comparing himself to the Manchester Arena suicide bomber. His track Unaccommodating, taken from his new album Music to Be Murdered By, includes controversial lyrics that appear to make light of the 2017 terror attack. Twenty-two people were murdered as they left an Ariana Grande concert after Salman Abedi detonated a bomb in the foyer of the music venue. In the track, the star raps: “But I’m contemplating yelling ‘bombs away’ on the game / Like I’m outside of an Ariana Grande concert waiting.” Hours after its release, the musician faced a backlash on social media. Figen Murray, whose 29-year-old son Martyn Hett died in the attack, called the song “pointless”. “Feels like he is piggybacking on the fame of Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber and says distasteful things about other celebrities,” she wrote on Twitter. “Not clever. Totally pointless. And before all Eminem fans pounce on me, I am not interested and will not engage.” Murray has campaigned for the introduction of Martyn’s Law, which would require venues to introduce more stringent security checks. Elkan Abrahamson, a solicitor for several of the bereaved families, said: “Eminem is a traitor to his talent; this is disrespectful, unwarranted and needlessly cruel.” Others agreed, with many Twitter users saying they were disgusted by the lyrics and that it was “a pathetic attempt to get attention”. “I am disgusted how did he or his team think this was okay? He’s trash,” one user wrote. Another said: “The fact that Eminem made a joke about the Manchester attack in his song makes me sick. He can’t get out of this one. He fully said her name and can’t deny it at all. Disgusting. How insensitive do you have to be to say something like this.” One user called on the rapper to show some respect to those who had died and been injured: “This is so messed up! Many people (mostly children) were injured at this concert and some even lost their lives, and he thinks it’s OK to put this lyric in a song? @Eminem maybe try and have a little respect, and don’t use a terrorist attack to gain clout.” The mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, said: “This is unnecessarily hurtful and deeply disrespectful to the families and all those affected.” It is the second time the rapper has referenced the Manchester arena bombing in his lyrics. In a 2018 freestyle battle rap, with a spoken caveat at the beginning that “nothing’s off limits” to get a reaction from the crowd, he rapped: “Squashed in between a brainwashing machine Like an Islamic regime, a jihadist extreme radical Suicide bomber that’s seeing Ariana Grande sing her last song of the evening And as the audience from the damn concert is leaving Detonates the device strapped to his abdominal region I’m not gonna finish that, for obvious reasons” Elsewhere in Unaccommodating, he compares himself to Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini, and also references the September 11 attacks. The album is the musician’s 11th full-length release, and his third album in three years. It features guest stars including Ed Sheeran, Q-Tip and late rapper Juice WRLD, who died aged 21 in December.
This week we’ve got a pop-punk paean, a disco-tinged banger, and a sizzling motivational pep-tune Dream Nails Text Me Back (Chirpse Degree Burns) Millennial culture is crying out for a horror franchise called Two Blue Ticks. This generation’s Blair Witch twig bundles, there’s nothing more terrifying than those evil, mocking signs that a potential life partner has evaporated from your WhatsApp chat like an illiterate poltergeist. And here are London “punk witches” Dream Nails with a soundtrack to being ghosted. “Reply to me! Acknowledge me! Validate me!” they bawl like a text-shunned Elastica. Next time you’re forced to double-text someone, just send them a link to this. Tame Impala Lost in Yesterday When physicists recently claimed to have evidence of particles moving between this and a parallel universe, chances are they’d heard Tame Impala. Album four and Kevin Parker is still running a soft rock disco in the 23rd dimension, even keeping the groove alive on this reflective ode to shedding emotional baggage. Somewhere, a thinner, sexier version of you is shagging to this right now. Fake Laugh If You Don’t Wanna Know “On tour with Gengahr” apparently, so there’ll be side-eyes over Travelodge vending machine breakfasts when word arrives that Gengahr’s single was nudged out of this column by Kamran Khan’s superior haze-pop beaut, resembling Kurt Vile pulling his finger out and writing a chorus, complete with synth lightning noises and everything. In 30 years your grandkids will ask you which side of the Gengahr v Fake Laugh wars you were on, so get down early. Georgia 24 Hours If you haven’t already become one with alcohol and ditched the self-flagellating purgatory of Dry January in an orgy of vodka and regret, here’s DIY pop producer Georgia with a motivational pep-tune. She’s teetotal and still manages to knock out sizzling future pop anthems about pulling all-nighters in Berlin. Lime and soda please, barkeep! Grouplove Deleter The ultimate “gang band” – those girl/boy combos who sound like the student house party next door reaching a sofa-trashing climax – LA’s eternal teenagers Grouplove have lost none of their sugar-rush jubilance over 10 years of rising fascism and James Corden. Deleter bemoans “braindead” modern culture, destitution and humanity’s extinction, but still sounds as if they’re chanting it from a top-down convertible speeding down Sunset.
Her openness and lyrical specificity make listening to the 25-year-old’s dramatic third album feel like reading someone else’s diary Real humanity … Halsey Real humanity … Halsey. Photograph: Aiden Cullen From the depressed self-medication documented in the emo-rap scene to the soul-baring by the likes of Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez, we’re living in an age of radical transparency in pop – and no one is more open than Ashley Frangipane, AKA 25-year-old singer Halsey. Her third album features Without Me, which reached No 1 in the US and spent an entire year in the charts, partly thanks to its catchiness and voguish opiated trap production, partly thanks to the bracing specificity of its lyrics, which castigated her famous rapper ex G-Eazy. It’s that specificity that powers Manic, too. Where pop has historically painted with broad brushstrokes in songs that could pertain to anyone, Halsey uses a finely sharpened nib. “I’m so glad I never ever had a baby with you / cause you can’t love nothing unless there’s something in it for you”; “Nobody loves you, they just try to fuck you / and put you on a feature on the B-side” – no one is actually named, but these lines make you sympathetically wince nonetheless. The latter is from the gorgeous closer 929, which also finds Halsey longing “for my father to finally call me” – by this point it feels like you’re crying after stealing a look at her diary when she went out for more wine. Her lyrical confidence is matched by the characterful production, which straddles R&B, country, trashy pop-rock, Kacey Musgraves-ish cosmic Americana and more; I Hate Everybody is like a gothic showtune. The interludes with star guests – Alanis Morrisette, BTS’s Suga – are frustrating, nearly done sketches, but otherwise this is that rare thing: a major label pop album with real drama and humanity.
Wiggles member recovering in hospital after falling to ground when leaving stage at Castle Hill RSL The Wiggles Yellow Wiggle Greg Page, top right, went into cardiac arrest at a bushfire relief concert in the Sydney suburb of Castle Hill. Photograph: Christopher Pledger/AP Original Wiggles member Greg Page collapsed and went into cardiac arrest at a bushfire relief concert in Sydney on Friday night. The original Yellow Wiggle was taken to Westmead hospital after falling to the ground as he left the stage at Castle Hill RSL. He is now recovering following surgery for a coronary occlusion. Paramedics said Page, 48, was alive because of the actions of an off-duty nurse who was attending the concert and jumped on stage to assist, using the RSL’s defibrillator and leading resuscitation efforts. “He was out for 20 minutes,” the woman, named Grace, told reporters on Saturday. “We gave him three shocks [with the defibrillator]. I took charge. I did not mean to, but I did. I walked in and I think I was the only one there who had any training, first aid training. So I just started to do what I do at work.” A paramedic from Ambulance New South Wales who responded to the triple-0 call said Grace saved Page’s life. “When I was on stage and Greg was stabilised I asked who the person who used the defibrillator was, and Grace anxiously stepped forward,” he said. “I told she needed to be congratulated because she had saved the man’s life. She did an extraordinary job and it was only through her efforts, and those who also performed CPR, that Greg is alive.” The group’s manager, Paul Field, said Page was expected to be in hospital for some time. “He was in such a serious way last night,” he told Channel Seven. “He needed CPR, we had two of our cast and crew working on him. They used a defibrillator on him three times. He was in a bad way. “The ambulance took him [to Westmead hospital]. I was so relieved that the blood was back in his face, he was talking, he was quite groggy. It was overwhelming relief.” Field said the performer had stopped breathing and had to be revived several times. “Steve, the drummer, and Kim, who works in our office, did CPR, they saved his life,” he said. “I’ve got to tell you, if there’s a lesson from that – it’s great to have people learn CPR.” The Wiggles’ official Twitter account said early on Saturday: “As has been reported, our friend Greg Page suffered a cardiac arrest at the end of the bushfire relief performance and was taken to hospital. “He has had a procedure and is now recovering in hospital. We appreciate your kind messages and concern.” The original Wiggles line-up of Page and Anthony Field, Murray Cook and Jeff Fatt were performing the first of two planned fundraisers for the bushfire relief effort. Page left the children’s band in 2006 due to poor health and returned for a second stint in 2012. In 2006 he revealed he was suffering from orthostatic intolerance, which caused problems with the function of his heart when standing. As the climate crisis escalates... … the Guardian will not stay quiet. This is our pledge: we will continue to give global heating, wildlife extinction and pollution the urgent attention and prominence they demand. The Guardian recognises the climate emergency as the defining issue of our times. You've read 129 articles in the last four months. We chose a different approach: to keep Guardian journalism open for all. We don't have a paywall because we believe everyone deserves access to factual information, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. Our editorial independence means we are free to investigate and challenge inaction by those in power. We will inform our readers about threats to the environment based on scientific facts, not driven by commercial or political interests. And we have made several important changes to our style guide to ensure the language we use accurately reflects the environmental catastrophe. The Guardian believes that the problems we face on the climate crisis are systemic and that fundamental societal change is needed. We will keep reporting on the efforts of individuals and communities around the world who are fearlessly taking a stand for future generations and the preservation of human life on earth. We want their stories to inspire hope. We will also report back on our own progress as an organisation, as we take important steps to address our impact on the environment. We hope you will consider supporting us today. We need your support to keep delivering quality journalism that’s open and independent. Every reader contribution, however big or small, is so valuable. Support The Guardian from as little as €1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
Each encounter with Puccini’s La bohème – assuming the performance is up to scratch, which the Royal Opera’s latest revival is – makes you rethink the elements that make this work a masterpiece: time-proof and foolproof, as a blunt critic early last century put it, bemoaning the grandmotherly Mimìs, screeching Musettas and overweight Rodolfos he’d endured over the years (he’d have to watch his adjectives today). The plot jumps awkwardly between its four “tableaux” acts. Aspects of the story don’t quite make sense. Yet Puccini spins his material into a perfect mesh of mirth and tears. His theatrical instinct is faultless, and no other composer teases out strands of melody so apparently effortlessly and rhapsodically. In the case of Bohème this means, famously, from first encounter to full-blown love in a matter of minutes for the seamstress Mimì and the poet Rodolfo. Their big Act 1 duet, O soave fanciulla, is a reliable test, early on, of the evening’s emotional temperature. The Romanian-born British soprano Simona Mihai (a late replacement, who sang the role for the ROH last year and plays Musetta later in the run) and the American tenor Charles Castronovo scored highly, with the conductor, Emmanuel Villaume, pacing this slowly unfurling music with well-judged control. In this score, the woodwind weaves and soars, now buried in the texture (the exuberant oboe tune is near the start), now singing its own melody, so often voiced by solo clarinet. Though the ROH players must know this music inside out, it sounded fresh and alive. The bustling opening between the four young bohemians was slightly chaotic in this return (the second) of Richard Jones’s 2017 production, but singing was strong: Andrzej Filończyk (Marcello), Peter Kellner (Colline), Gyula Nagy (Schaunard) were zestful students, the veteran Jeremy White lovable and tiresome as the landlord, Benoît. Aida Garifullina, saucy and sexy as Musetta, knows exactly how to hold the stage without stealing the show. Gradually this production is putting down roots. This was never going to happen instantly, given that the ROH’s previous old oak of a production had run for 41 years. Yet Jones’s production, too, has its charms, in the handsome if stiff embrace of Stewart Laing’s designs, with its magnificent Parisian arcades, Cafe Momus, and bewitching falling snow. See the show live in cinemas on 29 January. Weather is one of many aspects that come under the heading Nature Unwrapped, the new series at Kings Place, which began last weekend. These year-long projects (Venus Unwrapped – focusing on female composers – has just ended) offer a form of integrated programming that other venues might achieve for a weekend or a short festival but, on the whole, are not mad or brave enough to attempt for an entire season. Somehow Kings Place succeeds, mixing musical genres, film and spoken word as if concert life had always been this way. Whether you want poetry, folk or Monteverdi, it’s here. An artist in residence, the sound recordist and composer Chris Watson, will provide an aural calendar of the natural world, which started with winter on the Wash. Hearing, as you enter this auditorium in London’s King’s Cross, the teeming cries of wading birds and wildfowl in north-west Norfolk, could grow addictive. It was a welcome prelude, last Saturday, to the spare, mostly unaccompanied choral music of Arvo Pärt, sung by Theatre of Voices to Phie Ambo’s meditative film on the passing seasons, Songs from the Soil. These six agile singers, directed by Paul Hillier, also gave the UK premiere of A Western by Michael Gordon (a founder of Bang on a Can, the New York-based rock-jazz-minimalist ensemble). Witty and, in the right sense, slick, it borrows the storyline of the cowboy film High Noon (1952), and confronts the perils of consumerism at the expense of nature. On Tuesday, continuing Nature Unwrapped, the violinist Jack Liebeck “and friends” – an elite ensemble of five string players and harpsichordist – were joined by Brian Cox, physicist and media star. In between a crisp, rhythmically taut performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Cox explained – brilliantly and fluently if not entirely comprehensibly – the theory of relativity, the evolution of the universe, cosmology, quantum entanglement: the lot. With some ticket prices as low as £8.50 this was quite a bargain. I’d tell you more if I had time. Or spacetime… Star ratings (out of five) La bohème ★★★★ Nature Unwrapped ★★★★ • La bohème is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 27 May • Nature Unwrapped runs at Kings Place, London, throughout 2020
In a one-off special we bring you the top five streamed tracks on Spotify, and it’s no surprise Ed Sheeran appears twice Ed Sheeran Shape of You Not really a song but a guide track, initially intended for Little Mix or Rihanna, with placeholder instrumentation and a chorus that was clearly written as a duet but with Ed singing both parts. This being the most-streamed song of the decade is like saying the initial illustrated storyboard for Avengers is the most-watched film. Still, I suppose nothing defines the 2010s more than everything being so terrible that barely competent mediocrity suddenly becomes the appealing option. Drake ft Wizkid & Kyla One Dance The 2007 funky house classic Do You Mind had already defined Kyla’s decade; it was around the time she recorded the vocal for the track that she started dating one of its producers, Errol Reid. They married, had kids and she pretty much stopped making music and then one day she got a call from Sony saying Drake wanted to sample her vocal. Now she’s on one of the biggest songs in Spotify’s history. Moral of the story: if someone asks one to vocal a funky house track, one should. Post Malone ft 21 Savage Rockstar Why are rappers always claiming they want to be rock stars: what is it they’re craving? A drizzly mid-afternoon set at the Larmer Tree festival? An hour in the 6 Music studio debating the week’s releases? “I’ve been fuckin’ hos and poppin’ pills / Man, I feel just like a rock star,” Malone sings. He should try spending an afternoon with Dan from Bastille for a taste of the reality. The Chainsmokers ft Halsey Closer Has there ever been an act so successful and yet so anonymous? Never mind picking them out of a lineup, if they stripped off to reveal the words “WE ARE THE CHAINSMOKERS” written on their arse cheeks, would you have any idea who they were? It’s little surprise that they slip out their songs incognito; no one would want to put their face to something that sounds like the soundtrack to a YouTube compilation of the “raddest skateboard tricks ever vol 8”. Ed Sheeran Thinking Out Loud Sheeran’s best-written song and worst vocal performance: presumably his falsetto couldn’t withstand the rush to get the song into the hands of wedding DJs. This is a charming ode to love in later life, although his political silence throughout the decade may mean that when his “memory fades” he can’t complain if there is no time for romance as the UK retirement age by then is 105.
Given the general absence of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, bands tend to run away from middle England. But for Rob Knaggs, the songwriter with Sports Team, it’s where the action is. “I really like roundabouts, Britain in Bloom competitions, local parish newsletters,” he says. “High streets are covered in people’s symbols of belonging – like an Emma Bridgewater tin.” His six-piece band are making something improbably big out of this minutiae. Formed in 2016 while they were studying at Cambridge, in the past two years their exuberant indie-pop has taken them from tiny pub stages to a major label deal and, the day I meet them, filling the 2,300-capacity Forum in Kentish Town, north London. Their debut album comes out this spring. Along the way they have cultivated a young fanbase given to making memes and congregating on a WhatsApp group with the band. “Sometimes you’ll open your phone and there’ll be 2,000 messages, and they’re all bickering for 45 minutes about vegetable crisps,” Knaggs says. These are the middle-class kids who might have turned to rap, but now have, in Sports Team, a band singing about their lives. “We had this experience of life being quite mundane,” says the frontman, Alex Rice, whose bandmates grew up in Cheshire, Kent and Leeds. “If you’re a kid from Tunbridge Wells and you’re going to Pitcher and Piano on a Thursday, where’s the music for you? You want something that romanticises the world around you and makes you feel better about it.” Knaggs’ heroes are John Betjeman, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan; his songs, about fishing, Wetherspoons, flip phones and the M5, similarly find uplifting poetry in the everyday. One of their first songs, Stanton, was about the fire warden at their Cambridge college. “He would stand on this barrow, and say: ‘I’ve seen people burn to death!’” Knaggs says. “He took his job seriously, but it was intense.” Musically, the band bonded over bands such as Pavement. “Guitar music was not very cool,” Rice says. So to make their shows seem like “anything but a guitar music gig”, they invented Poundband, a club night with £1 entry that would feature sideshows such as their keyboardist, Ben Mack, doing, by his own admission, “freestyle rapping over eskibeats”. These japes evaporated when they graduated and moved in together in London, doing jobs in everything from social care to social media. “There was a sense of frustration at the social contract: you graduate, you get this job, and you’re supposed to feel fulfilled and happy,” says the drummer, Al Greenwood. “It very quickly became so routine. We were so lucky – it’s amazing to have a job and live independently in London. But there was a sense that there must be something more. A lot of friends are very successful, but very few of them say they are happy.” Rice agrees: “We really enjoyed Cambridge, going to lectures, thinking about things. It was quite stark for me that, when you come out, you’re really required to stop thinking to an enormous extent.” He says that a big part of the band is “to provide people with an alternative way to live their lives – we try to make it look joyful”. They are an endearing group, frequently bursting into laughter around the pub table, and weren’t always enamoured of their moodier London peers. “Having just moved to London you’d think everyone that was involved in music was a Goldsmiths graduate – some kind of Gucci magician,” Rice says, meaning the hyped glam troupe HMLTD, who Rice describes as “one of the worst bands ever”. It’s rather refreshing to have them indulge in the kind of sniping that once powered petty intra-scene dramas in the NME – Shame have been another target of their light-hearted beef. “[Indie magazines] DIY and Dork, they have to call every band the greatest band in the world because they rely on social media shares, and we just got a bit sick of it,” Rice says. “Part of having a sense of identity as a band is saying: this is what we’re not.” For Greenwood, what they’re not is “lazy, Martin Parr-esque” imagery; for Knaggs, it’s “posing in leather jackets with cigarettes in moody landscapes, that level of Strokes-yness. They’re like: ‘Oh, we’re poets, we got our lyrics by sitting in a pub and channelling James Joyce.’” Hang on, you’re sitting in a pub saying you’re channelling Betjeman! “At least our lyrics were written on a laptop in the studio, desperately trying to find a word that rhymes with rhododendrons,” Knaggs grins. “It doesn’t have to be a wilted rose to have some great significance – it could be a Motorola. It doesn’t have to be a skull, or a child smoking – it could be Ashton Kutcher. That could be your memento mori, that incredible poetic image. It doesn’t have to be a raven, or a grave, or Dublin in the rain. It could be London in the sunshine. It could be Thorpe Park on a Wednesday.” “Dublin in the rain” is, of course, a lyric by the Joyce-inspired band Fontaines DC, but Knaggs says they all love them, and Rice agrees: “There’ll always be a place for post-punk, but no one’s doing anything that new in it. Fontaines played last week and the average age [in the crowd] must have been mid-40s – brilliant, but it’s not that punk. It’s incredibly wealthy craft-ale fans. You go to our front row, it’s kids, it feels more vital and important.” Rice’s flouncing, peacocking stagecraft is a key part of the band’s vitality. “I hate every minute of being in the studio, I find it painfully dull, but performing is incredible – riling up a crowd for an hour,” he says. “People want something that feels a bit heroic on stage. They do want to feel a part of the gang, but you shouldn’t be too accessible.” “And yet everyone has your number on a WhatsApp group,” says the bassist, Oli Dewdney, after a perfect comic beat. With their Cambridge education and rhododendron-based lyrics, “there’s a risk of throwaway comments: ‘Oh, they’re Tories’”, Greenwood says. One journalist even accused them of a “poverty safari” by visiting Margate. Yet Sports Team’s complicated, sometimes contradictory character portraits are a noble, or perhaps naive attempt to avoid the factionalism of modern society and politics. Rice says “we’re all pretty Labour”, but “not tribal ... that Idles record, just coming out with a ‘fuck Boris’ attitude, it’s the tritest, cheapest form of politics. We’ve got this opportunity to be really subtle and actually engage people, rather than just trotting out talking points.” A union-jack-wearing character in their song The Races appears to be your typical side of Tory gammon – “He’ll never buy you a drink / But he’ll let you know he can” – but Rice says “there’s always an empathetic take. Even Kutcher, about a guy who’s frustrated with his haircut, is quite an empathetic portrayal.” Lots of people won’t have empathy with middle England right now, of course – but it’s just as much a part of Britain as anything and, as Rice says: “It would be far more dangerous if we turned up in flat caps and started doing northern accents, and you’ve seen plenty of bands doing that.” For once, he doesn’t name them.