The Null Device
2009/10/17
Rough Trade are releasing another indiepop compilation. Unlike the previous one, this one is not so much C86/Sarah/Postcard classics as music from the recent wave of indiepop. It's predominantly Swedish and British, though the recent wave of neo-C86 bands from New York (has anyone called this NYC86 yet?) is represented, as are bands from further afield (the Philippines' contribution is the excellent Moscow Olympics).
(Oddly enough, there is no Antipodean presence there; would it have killed them to put a Motifs song in?)
The compilation is comes out on the 9th of November; you can pre-order it here.
The Daily Mail specialises in pandering to the unspoken prejudices of Middle Britain; more so than other populist-Right tabloids, it maintains a veneer of middle-class respectability, tutting and curtain-twitching at the decline in public morality and property values, and, whilst officially deploring the BNP and its ilk, putting in the right plausibly-deniable dog whistles that appeal to the proto-fascist tendency. (The fascist tilt isn't just a figure of speech, the Mail notably praised Hitler and his strong leadership of Germany in the 1930s.)
Now, the Mail has outdone itself, publishing an article blaming the death of Stephen Gately, an openly gay boy band member (who, coroners determined, suffered from an undiagnosed heart condition) on his "unnatural lifestyle". The article's author, Jan Moir, almost managed to get away with not being overtly homophobic, by suggesting that the "dark appetites" and "private vice" were some kind of hypothetical celebrity drug culture, though blows any plausible deniability out of the water by saying that Gately's death "strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.". (What's that you say, Jan? Perhaps had he been socially coerced into a loveless sham marriage to a woman he could never love he'd still be alive?) Anyway, advertisers including Marks & Spencer have pulled their advertising from the Daily Mail.
And here is Charlie Brooker's masterful response to the article.