Music
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D’accord
Posted on Oct 12 2007 | Tagged as: Words, Music
“[Bob Marley’s] canon is bong-addled nonsense from soup to nuts, much of it barely elevated nursery rhymes: whenever one hears, again, him riffing about being “iron, like a lion, in Zion”, one braces for the shout out to his mate Brian, with his tie on.”
Your mother
Posted on Feb 25 2007 | Tagged as: Media, Music, Pedantry
Double disclaimer: Firstly, I know some of Los Campesinos!, have had the pleasure of interviewing them and it’s been a long time since music has got me this excited. Secondly, I know that finding errors in the Guardian - or indeed any of the national news media - is like taking candy from a quadriplegic baby.
But I still feel compelled to give this nonsense a good going over. It’s a piece on Los Campesinos! for the new bands bit, by Paul Lester who, evidently, doesn’t like them very much. Fair enough. However…
“…if they’re going to invoke the majestic spirit of the Castillian peninsula they ought at least to have made the effort to get the cocking grammar right; there should be an upside-down exclamation-mark at the start of their name if there’s one at the end, like this: ¡Los Campesinos!“
There’s so much wrong with this I hardly know where to start. Oh, yes. Here: Mr Lester could at least get the spelling right - it’s “Castilian”, with one ‘l’, not “Castillian”. He could also get the cocking geography right. The Castilian region is a plain in central Spain. The peninsular that is home to Spain and Portugal is the Iberian Peninsular. Tool.
“Los Campesinos! (it means “Farmers!” in Spanish; how cute)…”
How cute? How patronising. And I’d dispute that translation - I’d interpret campesinos as ‘(specifically rural) peasants’ rather than farmers. (A quick check of my dictionary has confirmed campesino as meaning ‘country person’ or ‘peasant’, while the most common word for farmer is granjero in Spain, or estanciero in Latin America.)
“Our quirkysomething septet might aim for the joyous abandon of Broken Social Scene and Clap Your Hands, but really all they manage to communicate is a sense of self-stimulation; seven giddy fools with glockenspiels.“
Check out the semicolon misuse at the end of that sentence. What was that about grammar? Paul Lester can’t punctuate in his native language and he’s criticising others for a minor error in a foreign tongue.
“To be fair, they’ve only been together for 18 months (they played their first gig last year at some whoopee palace called the Fun Factory) and this is only their second single.“
Well, it’s their first single, and someone so dismissive of small venues as to refer to Fun Factory as “some whoopee palace” either shouldn’t really be writing about new bands or is incredibly lazy.
“And maybe it’s time for a cull.“
Too right it is.
Paint Cheryl Tweedy Green
Posted on Dec 19 2006 | Tagged as: Politics, Music
I was going to try and write an incisive commentary on the interview with Girls Aloud in, of all publications, this week’s New Statesman. But I can’t make my mind up about it.
Is it, as it claims, a move away from using the Girls to try to be “trendy” by actually asking about their politics, or is it simply claiming to do that while actually secretly trying to be trendy too (in a similar vein to how the Spitting Image team’s Chicken Song - which I’m just old enough to remember - satirised catchy, summer-holiday nonsense songs such as Agadoo while actually being one)?
Content is still most important. Tidy!
Posted on Dec 06 2006 | Tagged as: The Stupid, Music
The Boss’s email update on Stuff That Is Happening In Journalism alerted us to this story from that unexpected source of predatory capitalism, the Media Guardian, about how it’s good content that keeps monthly magazines going over and above everything else.On the success of Men’s Health:
He went against the prevailing trends - Nuts-style semi-pornography or GQ-style aspirationalism - to find an everyman’s middle ground, commissioning respected writers such as William Leith and Will Self in order to realise it.
“We had to make it bigger than sex and six-packs,” says Rees, who won editor of the year for Men’s Magazines in the 2006 BSME Awards.
Even Nuts has its imitators.
Tidy magazine bills itself as, “the only mens lifestyle mag for Welsh boys and girls!” (sic[k]).
It is truly awful.
Un pensamiento
Posted on Nov 06 2006 | Tagged as: Words, Politics, Work, Music
I’ve just booked tickets to see some of the chaps from the Buena Vista Social Club play at the Wales Millenium Centre next march. I’d try and blag some from Quench or Buzz, but as much as I love the freebies, some gigs are just too important to risk not getting press tickets.
I’m thinking of whether to suggest to Amira, Quench’s interviews editor, that she pester them for an interview.[1] I’ve no idea how good these particular guys English is, however. From what I recall of the film, most of them could hardly speak a word - and no way is my Spanish good enough, having barely spoken any in about 18 months.
It did get me thinking about the way the language is spoken in Cuba though.
How would one address the guys from the Buena Vista Social Club? Spanish, as with most italic languages, has both polite and informal ways of saying “you”. In the plural forms, ustedes and vosotros, respectively[2]. Whenever I do actually try to converse in Spanish, I almost always use the friendly forms, even with people who I don’t know, where the polite form would be more usual; it’s become quite a bad habit. The slight touch of deference advisable in a celebrity interview would also suggest ustedes.
But Cuba is communist. Everyone’s equal, or supposed to be. Does that extend to the way in which strangers address one another, I wonder?
1 And I don’t believe for a second she’d have any trouble arranging it. This is a girl who got a phone call, out of the blue, from her dad, asking her if she’d like to speak to Ricky Martin. By far one of the most useful members of the team for a magazine like Quench.
2 The singular, usted, apparently comes from vuestra merced, or “your grace”, with the plural form of “your”. Joseph J Keenan suggests in Breaking out of Beginners’ Spanish that the members of the upper class referred to him/herself as “we” so frequently that the people decided to use the third-person plural also. Vosotros appears to literally mean “you others”, which, although entirely unrelated, reminded me of some language or other that has separate verb forms for “we”, one including the person to whom the speaker is speaking and one not.
How science ruins music: a painful exercise in pedantry
Posted on May 11 2006 | Tagged as: Science, Music, Pedantry
Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars,
let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars
Will just sang that at me.
However…
Since Mars and Jupiter have inclinations to the ecliptic of only 1.85 degrees and 1.31 degrees respectively, there would be no discernable seasons, so spring on Mars and Juptier wouldn’t exist.
