Every night, when I go to bed, I spend some time listening to the various digital music channels on Sky. I channel-hop until I find something decent – something which can make your finger tired after a while, as the amount of decent music seems to constitute less than 1% of the total music played on these channels.
I detest all forms of (c)rap music – the ‘c’ is silent when you pronounce that.
I like rock, so Kerrang! (Sky channel 368) is annoying when it plays (c)rap music. It’s also annoying when it keeps playing Slipknot and other bands who all sound exactly the same, and who feature lead singers for whom laryngitis is a suitable cover to hide their inability to sing. Apart from Kings Of Leon, Foo Fighters, and so on, one gem I heard recently was Operation Ground & Pound by Dragonforce. It was good enough to make me get tickets to go and see them on their forthcoming tour.
MTV2 (355) blows hot and cold. It goes through long phases of playing absolute rubbish (more (c)rap, Oasis, pop music, people from London pretending they talk like black gang members, people pretending they’re from London pretending they talk like black gang members, etc.). At rare intervals, they play a track a few times by someone who actually sounds good – so I got tickets while back to see MGMT in a few weeks. Meanwhile, MTV2 is back to playing Oasis every five minutes.
Sometimes, you’ll channel-hop several times through all the channels and the only music you can find is (c)rap. Boring bass lines, blokes trying to pretend they’re gangsters (sorry, ‘gangstas’ – illiteracy is mandatory for this genre), women trying to pretend they’re somehow hot, all feeling really happy with themselves because the video editor made it look as if they could dance like Michael Jackson used to be able to. Yaaaaawn. The only song in the last 10 years broadly from this genre that was anywhere near good was Outkast’s Hey Ya. And everything they did after that (and before) was crap (the ‘c’ isn’t silent this time).
Now, I enjoy some classical music, too. It’s great to hear Vivaldi or Mozart played by a decent orchestra or musician on ClassicFM (now oMusic, channel 369), though hearing Nigel Kennedy say ‘cool’ at the end of a performance is somehow pushing attempts to make classical more accessible a little too far. Videos for classical music often try too hard! There’s something slightly disturbing about a strapping red-haired woman being shown dressed demurely in one scene, then with her legs wide open and a cello stuffed in between them in another. It just doesn’t quite work. Some of the newer classical or pseudo-classical composers are simply pretentious (anything by the Michael Nyman band – discordant, reptitive garbage), but every now and then you find out about something really good. Sigur Ros and Efterklang are two such, and Little Death Orchestra’s Tiny Crescent Sun was excellent (shame they were a one-off).
But one that really caught my attention the other night was Nell Bryden’s Second Time Around (link removed as it is now broken).