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Pitchfork reviews Run the Road
- Thread starter Melchior
- Start date
Logan Sama said:I almost felt to stop reading after that opening paragraph. I had de ja vu.
This is why I have a distaste for CERTAIN journalists and publications attempting to cover our music. It comes across as some sort of liberal feel good story. The music receives rave reviews because that appears to be the in thing to do, rather than it being the honest opinion of the writer. And while that is all well and good today, when tomorrow comes and Grime has outlived its novelty and a new sound of the moment has been championed by some mop haired middle aged writer in Shoreditch, where does that leave the music that some of us actually put a lot of work in to make and sell?
I firmly encourage every artist I deal with to exploit and use any "trendy" press coverage they can get to further their own career and make permanent footholds in the industry rather than attempting to ride the tide of praise to stardom. When you have such whimsical publications as your sole source of promotion, your career is held in a fine balance. Thankfully we have Channel U now which will always help give new acts exposure, and lets natural selection take its course.
The music of Dylan Mills was always the real story of Boy In The Corner, not the fantastical "hard streets of Bow" in which the fairy-tale media accounts of his struggle were set. Bow's actually a lovely place.
I don't know if I am being overly protective or cynical, it just worries me in a "worst case scenario" kind of way when a lot of people who don't understand the music or culture of young Londoners try to make sweeping observations about the whole scene without really seeing it first hand. Every review seems to read the same nowadays "Brand new sound fresh out of the streets of London. Kids working on budget technology. Anger and anxiety expressed on wax. Isn't it all ever so marvellous"
Not every person who reads Vice or this Pitchfork publication has the same sort of musical appreciation or desire to absorb information as the people who use this forum. When I first came here I thought it would be a place entirely inhabited by the sort of journalistic types I can't stand, but thankfully I haven't really seen much of it. Just music lovers willing to absorb every piece of information about this scene that they can hunt down.
But the majority of people who see Grime articles in The Guardian, Vice, ID and The Observer will probably turn it into a "Buzz Word", and buzz words hold no longevity. I've already seen UK Garage self destruct due to egos and a passing media interest in the sound, I'd be most disappointed to see it happen again to this.
nicely put. people were saying something similar on ILX a while back about reviews of run the road but nobody listened.
bassnation
the abyss
logan sama said:Bow's actually a lovely place.
really? i know bow (and the east end generally) very well and i'm not sure i'd describe it in those terms. although there are harsher places in london life is not easy there for a lot of people.
not arguing with the rest of what you've got to say though.
Pearsall said:I think part of what makes grime seem 'blacker' than previous forms of London street music (ardkore, jungle, 2-step) is that it is mc-led rather than dj-led. The mc's in London street music have pretty much always been black, but the producers and dj's have been a more mixed bunch (which is still the case in grime). For instance, the only big white jungle mc I can remember was Shabba, 2-step was pretty much the same, and so it's not so surprising that grime is the same.
Plus there's also the fact that London, especially inner London, is getting less white English quite rapidly. The white population of inner London has dropped by quite a bit in the last decade, and the shrinking size of the white English population is also somewhat masked by the huge amounts of immigration from Eastern Europe over the last couple of years.
interestingly there seems to be a political element now to how different groups are referred to in inner london. my mate's (white, english) teenage kids (and their racially-mixed mates) in north london refer to other white kids who still have what is to them archaic views about race meaning anything as "cockneys". according to them, there's still a few "cockneys" around the area they live (chalk farm) but mostly the term refers to white kids with racist parents who've moved out to the outskirts of london but they still come across at raves, work, etc.
at the same time as anti-racism being quite "natural" to this generation in this area now though, it goes without saying to them that while life's not easy for every almost every working-class kid, its doubly not easy if you're black - more problems at school, stop and search, employment, social mobility etc.