I strike a blow for international freedom of speech

This morning I went onto the Belgian-based online music magazine Side-Line, one of my favourite sites for news about electro-industrial music, and was shocked to discover that they had made it impossible for anyone other than Facebook users to post comment on their news items. Being, as I am, an opponent of the corporate might of Facebook and other "social networking" sites, which I view as intrusive and unnecessary, I immediately sent an email to them to complain, denouncing the move as a dangerous and ill-advised attempt to curb freedom of speech. I felt this tremendously ironic given that the site has long held itself up as a bastion of that very thing, even refusing to condemn the extreme right-wing views of Croat rocker Marko "Thompson" Perkovic. Shortly thereafter I received an email from Side-Line's chief editor Bernard Van Isacker, whose rationale for the move was that "it avoids that people hide themselves behind anonymous accounts like what was the case in the past on Side-Line and where Side-Line was the only one to take responsability [sic] for comments that appeared on the site". However, after I argued that he was denying the right to comment to the many people who do not wish to have a Facebook account, he changed it back, with the caveat that "if abused it goes down immediately", which I thought was perfectly reasonable. Ultimately, however, his argument just doesn't wash with me. Everyone who leaves a comment has to give an email address, which I accept could be fake, but I see no reason why Side-Line should have to "take responsibility" for comments that appear on the site - surely they could just have a corporate-style disclaimer saying something like "All views expressed in comments are posters' own and do not necessarily represent the views of Side-Line and its affiliates". I suggested this to Mr Van Isacker, but have yet to receive a response.

Ash charge fans £130 for double album

A couple of years ago Ash, the Northern Irish rockers once touted as saviours of British indie, announced that they would no longer be making albums and would only release singles instead. They have held true to their word and starting next week they are releasing a series of 26 seven-inch singles, one a fortnight, and doing an A-Z tour of obscure UK towns from Aldershot to Zennor. Each of these singles has one track (the B-side is etched) and retails for £5. This means that if fans choose to buy them all, they will pay £130 for a double album's worth of material. Way to screw your fans, Tim! Now I lost interest in Ash years ago but even if I was a fan I would stick two fingers up to this shameless cashgrab and download the whole lot for free just to teach them a lesson, which is exactly what I hope happens. And what's the bet that at the end of the year, all the tracks will be released on a double CD retailing for a tenth of the cost of the vinyl? "Oh, it's not really an album," they'll say. "It's a compilation."

The trouble with Gaelic

People are always bemoaning the fact that young people don't want to learn Gaelic. Well I'll tell you why - it' s because they're not seeing anything in Gaelic culture that they can connect with. And when the pinnacle of Gaelic popular culture is these guys, who can blame them? What is needed is something ultra-hip and trendy, that kids actually like. To this end I have decided to write and produce a Gaelic pop-trance tune in the style of All Around The World Records called "Cuan Eadarainn" ("An Ocean Between Us"), have it sung by an attractive young lady and shoot a sexy video for it. The kids will lap it up! Is anybody interested in getting involved? To start with, my friends in my Gaelic class are going to give me some help in translating the lyrics (as my Gaelic isn't that great, I've written it in English first), and then I'll be looking for a vocalist.

Visual Kei

For a couple of years now my favourite genre of music has been visual kei, a form of rock music from Japan. “Kei” translates variously as “type”, “style” or “system”. As you can probably imagine from the name, the look of the bands is pretty important. It’s probably best described as a cross between glam metal, goth and new romantic, with some of the bands wearing ridiculously elaborate stage costumes. 99.9% of the bands in the scene have exclusively male members but the aim seems to be to look as "androgynous" (read: feminine) as possible. This is probably because the target market for the music, in Japan at least, is predominantly teenage girls, who, presumably, fancy men who look like teenage girls.

Matenrou Opera
Image © 2009 Sherow Artist Society

However, as far as I’m concerned, music is an auditory medium, not a visual one, and it’s what the music sounds like that matters. Many suggest that VK is not actually a single genre of music at all, that it’s more like what I have called a “virtual genre” like emo, nu-metal or clicks ‘n’ cuts – that is, a catch-all term for a number of essentially unrelated genres that just happen to be thematically linked in some way. I beg to differ - you know immediately when you’re listening to a VK band. What I like best about it is that unlike in the West, there is no taboo about mashing different genres together, so you can have pop, punk, metal, industrial, electronica and Japanese traditional influences right next to each other, even in the course of the same song. Also, lines or even single words of English will be randomly dropped into the lyrics, presumably for aesthetic effect. In my opinion, the very best bands are those who balance the darkness and power of modern metal with the melodic immediacy of pop. When it’s done right, it doesn’t sound at all forced, but natural. At these moments it becomes obvious why this is swiftly becoming my favourite genre of all time. Watch this space for regular updates on the new VK albums I’ve bought, along with my views.

Tha beagan Gàidhlig agam

I've been learning Gaelic at City Lit in London for the last year. It's the summer holidays now, but there's one more year of the course left, which I'm going to sign up for. I'm really enjoying learning it; I think I caught the language-learning bug after studying German for four years as part of my linguistics degree at Birkbeck. As a Celtic language, Gaelic is quite hard to learn if you're used to learning Germanic or Romance languages like most people in this country do in school. It has verb-subject-object word order, which means the verb usually comes first in the sentence. It also has some weird idiosyncracies, such as having no verb "to have", which means that if you want to say you have something you have to say it's "at" you or "on" you, and if you want to say that you are something, you have to say that it's "in" you. There are loads of these prepositional constructions and in addition, all the prepositions can combine with all the pronouns to create scores of "prepositional pronouns" which you also have to learn. Having a linguistics degree is a definite advantage because then you understand how languages actually work and fit together. It's a real challenge but hey, I like that sort of thing and there are loads of resources to help, most prominently BBC Alba, the BBC's Gaelic-language TV channel. I've also joined two fora for learners, Fòram na Gàidhlig and mygaelic. Despite a recent increase in institutional support, many people (primarily Scots, I'm sorry to say) seem to feel there is no value in learning Gaelic. I am proud of my Scottish heritage and I think of Gaelic as a link to my ancestors, who would have spoken it. But it is also an intrinsic part of the culture and history of the British Isles and as a linguist, I will fight tooth and nail to prevent it from going the way of the dodo.

Recording

I was in the studio with my brother the other evening working on recordings for my new tune "Franky", which will hopefully appear on the debut release from my long-lived, on-again-off-again musical project Listed Buildings. Hopefully I'll one day get around to finishing the band's website; in the meantime I'll post regular bits about it here. My brother is the former frontman of sadly defunct Croydon indie rock band Free Flights Up and is friends with a guy who has built a fully-functional studio at the bottom of his garden and lets us use it for free. Recordings are going well, this was our third session and we've pretty much done most of it - only the guitar solo, keyboard and backing vocals left to do. Hopefully we'll finish it next time and then I'll post it here for your delectation.

My bro at the mixing desk...

...on the acoustic guitar...

...and me in the vocal booth. Attractive, eh?

Nicola Roberts

The members of Girls Aloud were in the paper again last night for some reason or another. After careful deliberation, I can categorically state that Nicola Roberts, the "ugly" one, is the only genuinely good-looking member of the group.

Nicola Roberts
Image © 2008 Michael Labica & Sandrine Dulermo