David Emery OnlineReflection: the national on the big stage
While we’re on the topic of long-form music writing, have a read of this great piece charting the (eventual) rise of The National. It’s an interesting read, and brings up some interesting thoughts about the consumption of digital music and the subsequent consequences in the comments.
Incidentally, The National for me are the very definition of a ‘grower’ band; every album they’ve done so far on first listen has sounded slightly dull – it’s only a month (or two or three) later that I realise just how brilliant it is. For reference, that is very fucking brilliant.
Visit ➔Is The BBC The Enemy Of Hip Hop?
A very worthwhile read on the state of racial segregation on UK public radio today. The concept of 1xtra and things like the Mobo Awards has always sat uncomfortably with me (their very being is basically based on racist thinking), and it’s good to see I’m not alone in that.
Also, it’s also well worth checking out www.thequietus.com in more depth – it’s fast becoming my favourite music blog as it has a very refreshing focus on actual writing and journalism, as opposed to the up-to-the-minute news slant that most music sites take.
Visit ➔MySpace opens its garden, allows third-party data sharing
A very promising start, although it seems to be limited to ‘people’ at the moment – I’d really like to hack away at getting data from artist profiles. It’s good to see MySpace finally getting their shit together, what with this and the recent redesign – they just need to redesign profile pages next…
Visit ➔Expression Engine vs Textpattern
Mr Hicks is pretty much on the money here, I think – Expression Engine is definitely more powerful then Textpattern, especially when it comes to things like users, but it’s just not as ‘nice’ to use.
Visit ➔An Essential Dozen: 2008's best albums so far
I was considering posting a ‘albums of the year so far’ type post, but this pretty much covers it (bar a few exceptions, which I’m sure they’ll have in tomorrows follow up best). Not often you come across a music related list you wholly agree with…
Visit ➔Firefox developers accelerate CSS implementation
Looks promising – the more browsers that implement CSS3 selectors and CSS Animations/Transforms the better.
Visit ➔A New Day
A lovely redesign by Jason Santa Maria – makes me want to do yet another redesign (of course!). I’m very interested in this whole concept of per-article styling – bringing art direction into web design is very important I think; I’m itching to find a site that I can have a go at really mixing things up on and making all the content ‘unique’ from a design perspective.
Down with page templates!
Visit ➔Introducing MagCloud and the Future of Magazine Publishing
I really like the idea of being able to self-publish a magazine – it’s a much more interesting concept to me then book self-publishing. Hopefully MagCloud will expand to the UK sooner rather then later as it looks like a very easy way of doing it.
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