Sonic Bucks

Just read this brief interview with Thurston Moore (which I came to via Idolator) in which I found out that Sonic Youth are putting out an album with Starbucks. Now, while Thurston is obviously kind of right when he says, "There's no difference between working with Starbucks and working with record labels like Universal and Geffen", he is, in one sense, absolutely right, and yet, in another sense, he is of course completely wrong, simply because Starbucks stands for shit that Universal and Geffen don't. And then he says some shit about there being a great independent underground. Which obviously Sonic Youth are not a part of, they actively seek out Starbucks, am I right Thurston? "The Starbucks thing was our idea". Yes I'm right.

The best bit of the interview is this bit:

I thought, "Why don't we get some of the people in the media who name-check Sonic Youth to choose their favorite songs, and then put them on a CD?"

Yeah, so what's Dave Eggers's favorite Sonic Youth song?

I forget.

Poo Fighters

Read this in The Sun:

HE may have a reputation for being the nicest guy in rock, but it turns out that there's at least one person who can turn DAVE GROHL nasty in a heartbeat.

Apparently, one mention of the name PARIS HILTON sends the FOO FIGHTERS frontman utterly ballistic.

Dave rages: "Paris is f***ing lame."

And, warming to his theme, he continues: "She's more offensive to me than anything.

"She's a total, raging, disgusting, rich, lazy party slut. I pray that my daughter will not turn out like her.

First off, I'm not going to bother slagging him off for saying that there's nothing more offensive than Paris Hilton because obviously I spend far too much time on celebrity shit rather than concentrating on more serious "issues", but still...

No, the thing I will slag him off for is the pathetic reason that he hates her:

Dave and Paris fell out in spectacular style after meeting in a restaurant years ago, when Dave claims that the pampered heiress put on "the full princess attitude with the nose in the air".

What a fuckwit he is.

A different view

Just read an interview of Avril Lavigne by Nelly Furtado (not sure why this happened) which I think goes some way towards proving that the Q interview was some sort of joke on her part. Here she's much more normal though her talk of markets and stuff always pisses me off, but I guess it's this - unconscious - conflict between the "business" and the "art" that creates the tension in her music so...

Anyway, here's some scans I picked up from Superiorpics


It's not the most interesting of interviews to be fair, so i'm not bothering typing this up and going through it, but I guess that's almost the point: this is so the opposite of the Q interview that the Q interview must have been a gag.
And the other point being that here she's not talking to a journalist.

Avril's Q Interview Dissected

I've had a few days with that Q interview now and I've calmed down a bit about it. For one thing, now I've transcribed it I'm finding that there is some bizarre punctuation which leads me to question it's veracity. Which is my way of saying that I'm not convinced there hasn't been some editing/paraphrasing of a spoken interview to make her sound like a rock stereotype, rather than my original thought/hope which was that Avril was satirizing this position.

Anyway, here's the transcript, from which I've removed Q's editorial comments, primarily because they were useless, for instance telling us that she's referring to Hurricane Katrina a sentence before she tells us herself (Q really rates the intelligence of it's readers...). I've added my own comments after each “commandment”:

1 DEAL WITH IT. Selling 24 million albums hasn't really affected me, but it has changed things. I can't walk into a room full of people any more without everybody turning their heads and I can only eat in certain restaurants where I know I won't get hassled. But that's OK. I was born to do this, and I've learned how to cope.

[Self-satisfaction about selling lots of records and the attention she gets and, having just been watching several clips of the whole Kanye vs 50 Cent thing, I think this must be seen as pretty standard. It perhaps paves the way for the more bizarre moments later and this raises the question of editing again, is this numbered interview in the order it was given? Was it given as a series of bullet points?]

2 DEVELOP AN IMAGE. Someone like Kelly Clarkson is beautiful and has a pretty voice, but with me you get a much stronger image. I'm tough, I have a look that girls want to copy, and I sound a particular way. It's good if you're not easily ignored. And I'm not.

[This follows quite a lot of the themes that are in Avril's songs where the notion of image as opposed to some “eternal soul” or united “self” is often to the fore, and, following the third album's more confident posturings, we see (throughout the interview) the image taking over, it is not “I have a tough image”, but “I'm tough”.]

3 DON'T GET MAD GET EVEN. I was 17 when my first album came out, and all of a sudden I had to spend my days doing interviews. Listen, when you are 17 you don't know how to hold a conversation with an adult, and you pretty much don't want to. But I learned to channel that into my music.

[17 year olds don't know how to talk to adults? This could of course be a signal that this whole interview is an example of her strategy to cope with the media. At 17, not liking to talk to the media, she came up with a persona to deal with it, a persona which she can still use, and which, given her testy relationship with the media, she wouldn't, presumably, be afraid to play to the worst of her image.]

4 PARTY HARD, BUT NOT TOO HARD. When I go to a party, I am the party! I'm the girl doing shots. Jumping on tables, screaming and getting wasted. Am I advocating drugs? No! When I say wasted, that doesn't mean go crazy. Drink in moderation. Be responsible, yeah?

[I think this is genius just the way it runs away and then gets pulled back. Here, I think the use of exclamation points, tells us that whoever wrote this interview thinks he (I assume it's a male journalist) is taking the piss out of Avril, whereas, given my comment after point 3, the reverse may well be true]

5 PRACTICE GOOD KARMA I am a very giving person. When the hurricane thing happened, I went to my closet, filled six boxes of stuff and said to my assistant, “Take it to Katrina!” I also like to give stuff to people who are my “workers”, especially if they don't make much money.

[This, again, is genius. How anyone can actually take this as anything other than satire on the whole Bono school of rock condescension is beyond me. And again the bizarre punctuation makes me wonder who on earth wrote this? Why put quotations around “workers”? And why the exclamation point after Katrina?]

6 BE GRATEFUL. It's important to be thankful, even if you're poor. I mean, come on, we all have clean water – well OK, not people in the developing world. It's important to remember where we came from, and just how how lucky we are to be here.

[Again the Bono-ism comes in and again the quick turnaround. Love it.]

7 ADVOCATE SPIRITUALITY. I'm not particularly religious, but I am spiritual. What kind? Feng Shui, mostly, and energy. I'm good at picking up people's energy, like I'm receptive or something.

[Cast Iron satire on pop stars and stupid spiritual ideas]

8 FIND MR RIGHT. I got married last year, simply because I was lucky enough to find the right guy. Did I tame him? Hey, we were both party animals once, so we've tamed each other.

[Whatever. Currently trying to write something on (vaguely) this subject so I'll save thoughts for that]

9 EXTEND YOURSELF. I want to get into movies next, a lead role in a super cool indie flick. I've been looking at scripts for the past two years now and most of them have been shit, but I know I could be real good at it. I have an agent now, and everything.

[I like this expression, “super cool indie flick”, and the “most of them have been shit line”. Given that in point 1 she says, “I was born to do this [music]”, it's interesting that near the end she wants to do something else. This should be seen in the context of her lyrics where, as pointed out before, there is always tension between some “essential” Avril and the image “Avril”]

10 LOVE YOURSELF. People love me and people hate me, but I'm comfortable in my own skin and that's what counts. And anyway, if you do hate me, you're the loser, not me.

[This is again related to what I generally say about Avril's lyrics so I won't press the point here]

No News Is Good News

Spent most of the morning on the couch, unable to move, recovering from Saturday night, and due to a mysterious malfunction of my DVD player, watching BBC News 24. Now, I'm fully aware of the "demands" of 24 hour news, which news people seem to use to excuse showing a load of shit on 24 hour news channels, and I'm aware that Sunday morning isn't exactly the fastest of news days, but the coverage of Madeline McCann's parents leaving Portugal seemed excessive by any rational standard. At about 6:35 they left the pictures of journalists outside the Portuguese villa the McCann's were staying in to go to the sports news. At about 6:38 they interrupted the sports news to return to the pictures because ... oh ... absolutely nothing was happening. They were still waiting there, watching absolutely nothing at about 7:05 when I had to go and throw up (due to hangover, rather than the pictures).

I'm not wanting to comment on the newsworthiness or otherwise of this event, I was more concerned with the way the BBC distanced itself from the reporting. The number of times they referred to the huge interest of the media in the case and gaped at the amount of media people encamped outside the villa seemed to suggest that the BBC thought itself apart from all this sensationalist reporting.

The BBC had a reporter at the villa, a reporter at the airport and now they are in the McCann's hometown, not only reporting but also giving the main headlines from there. But of course the BBC are not a part of the frenzy around the McCanns.

The worst bit was the reporter outside the airport telling us about the reporters following the McCann's car, some overtaking it to get better (and she stressed that these were press photographers - not the so much classier TV news people) shots, meaning the McCann's journey took longer than it should have done (perhaps an implication that these reporters were acting dangerously?). Of course this report followed on from ... shots of the McCann's car driving to the airport which included ... close up shots of the McCann's in their car taken by an overtaking camera man.

I'm not sure I want to criticise the BBC specifically, maybe two or three years ago I may have expected better from them but probably not now, it is more the media as a whole which seems unable to comprehend it's own position in the reporting of news. Which is to say that any reporter will be reporting among a herd of reporters and they will all be reporting on the herd of reporters this event has attracted, but they will all report as if they were not included in this herd, as if they have the right to be there and it is all the others who have turned it into a circus.

Dogs Rock

Saw this and couldn't resist posting it.

Just how cool are dogs?

Avril Is Truly Genius

Much as Perez hates Avril he does at least produce the goods when it comes to posting stuff about her. The interview he links to today is pretty insane.


The first three items you maybe think - "what the fuck?!", but let's face it, by 4,5 and 6?! you're thinking "this girl is a genius!"


I'm not a reader of Q so i'm not really sure of the context of this "Ten Commandments" thing but it must be some sort of opportunity for people to take the piss yeah?

And if it isn't that just makes it even sweeter. I think there's a certain image of Avril in the media (possibly tied to her reactions to them, the finger and the spitting) of someone pretty po-faced which this interview sends up in a pretty amazing way.

And if Perez hates her she must be doing something right. I certainly have a lot more respect for her than for bleeding Beth Ditto.

Anyway, when I get round to typing out (or finding it somewhere else) the interview I'll do a bigger piece on it.

It deserves it.