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- Is this the truth about women in hip-hop?
A recent documentary offered female rappers the chance to tell their story in a bid to answer: where did all the women go?
Earlier this year, American journalist Latoya Peterson wrote about the rise of Nicki Minaj and what it meant for the role of women in hip-hop. Well it seems she wasn't the only person interested in, or concerned about, the rise of the titillating female MC. This week, a documentary called My Mic Sounds Nice: A Truth About Women and Hip-Hop aired on US network BET. The show tells the story of the last 30 years in rap through the words of the women involved – MC Lyte, Rah Digga, Salt N Pepa and Missy Elliott.
The story begins in New York in the late 70s/early 80s, with Funky Four Plus One, Mercedes Ladies and Roxanne Shanté. There was Queen Latifah and MC Lyte, represented as women who shared a similar political consciousness as Public Enemy. By the time we enter the 90s, a distinction emerges between the hyper-sexualisation of Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown and the peerless presence of Lauryn Hill. Hill's prestige is given great prominence, viewed retrospectively as a breath of fresh air compared to Foxy and Kim, because her talent, intelligence and refusal to compromise "represented the best of ourselves", as one commentator says. Her decision to effectively abandon the industry following the success of her 1998 album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is even credited with having left a talent void that remains to this day.
While Missy Elliott gets a nod for innovation and individuality – Swizz Beatz describes her as a "triple threat" because she writes, produces and performs – the documentary finishes with a look at the the career of Trina. Consistently successful over the past decade (though admittedly never on a massive scale), Trina is regarded as something of a lone voice in mainstream hip-hop, currently sharing the spotlight with Nicki Minaj and marketing herself in much the same way – with her body.
At one point, critic Smokey Fontaine claims there were more than 40 female rappers signed to major labels, but says that figure has shrunk dramatically in recent years. The women who appear in the documentary provide some of the answers as to why this may be the case. One suggestion is that black women need too much physical maintenance – the hair, the nails, the wardrobe – on the road. But the truth is far more depressing. "(Men) want to see me as sexy, because I'm a female," explains Trina, "(they think) 'I'm a dude, I'm not learning nothing from you, I just want to see you.'" MC Lyte surmises: "Men spend so long degrading women in hip-hop, how could we ever expect consumers to support female MCs?"
Much of My Mic Sounds Nice is illuminating and celebratory, and there is an attempt to end the show on a high note, by highlighting underground female MCs such as Invincible and Medusa. But it's difficult not to feel downhearted after hearing several prominent and pioneering female rappers decry hip-hop for still being a "man's game". Unfortunately BET have chosen to remove much of the documentary from the internet (with the exception of, for some reason, part three, which you can see below- for the time being) but you can view clips from and disucssion of the issue here.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Переслать - Music Weekly: Mercury prize 2010 special
This week's show looks ahead to the Mercury prize, to be dished out to one of 12 nominees next Tuesday (7 September). Alexis Petridis is joined by Rosie Swash, Alex Needham and Michael Hann to discuss albums by Dizzee Rascal, Paul Weller, Foals, Corinne Bailey Rae, Mumford & Sons and Biffy Clyro, and there are interviews with Kit Downes Trio, Laura Marling, the XX, Wild Beasts, I Am Kloot and Villagers. The panel also give their verdict on who they think will walk away with the prize – and who they think deserves it.
Let us know your thoughts on this year's prize (and friend us on Facebook and Twitter), and we'll be back next week.
Переслать - Readers recommend: songs about anniversaries
As this column celebrates its fifth birthday, we'd like you to suggest songs with commemorative themes
Look at this. It's the first ever Readers Recommend blog, posted five years ago on 1 September 2005. The theme was change. Almost everyone posted under their own name. There's so many copyright-infringing lyric postings it's a wonder we're still here. Nobody nominates Richard Thompson. Nor Ernie the fastest milkman in the west, for that matter. There are no noms, donds or justis, no bukes, no @s and no puns. The Spill was still a glint in Blimpy's eye and the Marconium was but a heretical dream. What a long way we've all come, ladies and gentlemen. So on the count of three, let's hear it for you all:
Happy fifth birthday to Readers Recommend!
I would now like to propose a toast. Or some toast. Depending on whether you're reading this at breakfast.
And after that's all settled down, some housekeeping.
Last week's A-list (and the column that talks about it): Buchanan and Goodwin – Flying Saucer Number 1; Beatles - Drive My Car; Tim Minchin – If You Really Loved Me; Half Man Half Biscuit – A Shropshire Lad; Tom Lehrer – Elements; Was (not was) – What up Dog?; Billie Holiday – Do nothing till you hear from me; MC Lyte – Absolutely Positively; Frank Black – Song of the Shrimp; Johnny Cash – Boy Named Sue
Now follows your B-list:
Simon & Garfunkel – A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission)
Anyone can knock out a simple, desultory Philippic, but can they make it whipsmart funny? Simon and Garfunkel can.
The Sonics – Strychnine
"It'll make you jump, it'll make you shout, it'll even knock you out!" Good joke that, and a typically adorable piece of garage proto-punk to boot.
Frank Zappa – Cosmik Debris
Liked this a lot both for its weaving structure and for the woozy anti-guru sentiments (not that I should be encouraging such behaviour). Didn't think there were any jokes as such, but it did make me chuckle.
Beastie Boys – Professor Booty
"Yo shut the f up Chico man!" An irressistible track from the Beasties' best album (IMHO) and with a piece of dialogue, innocently spoken, but turned into a pun through a change of context.
Flight of the Conchords – Hiphopopotamus v Rhymenoceros
I first heard this song as it was performed to me by two Americans on a bus in Malawi. It sounds much better when done by Bret and Jermaine.
Kip Hanrahan – The Hasheater's Tale
Thoroughly disorienting, which is what makes it so intriguing. A polyrhythmic and polysyllabic flight of wild fancy.
Screaming Jay Hawkins – Constipation Blues
This made me laugh, as much as for the rock'n'roll roaring cum sphincter-straining groans as for the mock-bluesy conceit: "Most people sing songs about heartbreak ... being broke ... nobody's went out and recorded a song about real pain ..."
The Cramps – Thee Most Exalted Potentate of Love
Must have been in a garage kinda mood this week, because I'm not at all sure where the jokes are in this – but I couldn't stop listening to it, trying to find out.
The Mighty Sparrow – Sell the Pussy Cat
Is this one big joke, or just a funny song? I have to confess, here, in the middle of the blog where no one can see it, that I had some problems distinguishing at points during my listening. In conclusion I think the Mighty Sparrow has not written a joke, whereas MC Lyte did, but this track is funnier.
The Divine Comedy – Can You Stand Up On One Leg?
A bit meta I grant you, as this gentle piece of middle-aged whimsy contains no jokes, but does leave space for you to include your own.
This week it's a commemorative fifth-birthday theme. I want songs about anniversaries, or songs that feature them. That takes in birthdays and weddings, of course, but for the miserablists among you, something more melancholy too. I'll allow you to dictate the strictness with which the rubric is applied, because – after all – it's your birthday.
The toolbox: Archive, the Marconium, the Spill, the Collabo.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Behind the music: Awal keeps digital royalties from going awol
Artists Without a Label, started by two musicians formerly signed to Polydor, are tackling the murky issue of digital royalty payments – and revealing some startling disparities
There was a time when the best outlet for a disgruntled musician or record producer to vent their frustration with record labels was message boards and blogs. But when Kevin Bacon and Jonathan Quarmby endured problems with their record label, the pair decided to do something constructive. Instead of taking to the internet for a moan, they set up Artists Without a Label, a venture designed to help artists navigate their careers without, you guessed it, a label.
Bacon started out as a bass player in a band called ComSat Angels, who signed to Polydor (now part of Universal) in 1979, making three albums for the label. "After we started Awal, we asked Universal if we could sub-license the albums and release them digitally, but Universal wouldn't allow us to do it," says Bacon. The band eventually saw a press release stating that Polydor had started a smaller label to re-release "classic" albums digitally – ComSat Angels records included.
"We thought: 'That's interesting, it was a deal that was signed in 1979, with no mention of digital.' I don't remember signing an 'any of the formats that will ever be invented in the universe' clause," says Bacon. "We'd give them a call – not to stop them, but to find out how much we were going to get paid per download, as digital was not included in the original deal." The band were told the rate would be 9% of 90% of the sales price per download – minus a 20% "packaging deduction". Exactly how these figures are reached remains a mystery, as Polydor have yet to respond to queries.
The band also asked if Polydor could send them a royalty statement, as they hadn't seen one in 20 years. The label representative asked for their bank details, to pay them the money. Then all went quiet. Despite numerous subsequent phone calls and emails, the band has yet to receive a penny.
Yet Bacon calls that a minor gripe compared to the disparity of digital royalties: bands often only get 8% royalties on digital sales, as compared to an 18% royalty rate on physical records. ComSat Angels had a typical deal for their era: 16% royalties for vinyl, a 15% further deduction for cassettes and a 25% deduction for "packaging and new development costs". "Pink Floyd got a 2% royalty rate on their original catalogue," says Bacon. "Now, because digital is a new format, you don't get the full royalty. That's why you still don't see some of the big older acts on iTunes."
Quarmby says Awal was called in to Terra Firma (owners of EMI) to help them digitise tracks that had been gathering dust in the cellars of EMI in the UK and the Capitol Records building in LA. "Their vision was amazing. They wanted to make previously unheard tracks available to the public and for synchs (advertising, soundtracks etc)," says Bacon. "But what they hadn't realised was that their relationships with their artists were terrible." They brought in lawyers to sift through the contracts and, to their frustration, learned they'd need the artists' permission to digitise the old tracks – and the artists refused.
Quarmby, an ex-artist and record producer himself, says he and Bacon initially saw Awal as a resource for themselves and their friends who had also felt cheated of fair royalty payments. They drew up simple one-page contracts (traditional record contracts are usually hundreds of pages long) that were short term and let the artists retain ownership of their music. "Now, this is fairly common," says Quarmby. "But when we started four years ago, people said: 'That's not a good business model. If you don't have any rights, how can you sell the company?' Which, of course, wasn't our aim."
In addition, Awal developed a transparent way of reporting sales. Their clients can see, on their accounts page, exactly how many records they've sold, as early as the day after the sale. They also provide data of which geographical territories those records have been sold in. Their newly launched utility BuzzDeck also tracks radio play, social networking comments and streams, all to "help artists understand their business – and it is a business for most of them".
Just don't call them a label, Bacon and Quarmby insist. "Do we invest in artists? Sometimes we can't help it. We don't promise to do a lot of marketing, but we'll help empower our clients with lots of information."
Acts such as Arctic Monkeys, Editors, Moby and Jay Sean have used Awal before signing with traditional labels. "We're not against record labels," says Bacon. "For the right artist at the right time, they're still a good option. The thing is, they could've marched into the digital age hand in hand with the artists. They did pretty much the opposite. Instead, they went and did all these deals with digital stores, not necessarily passing on the money to their artists, allegedly – well, the fact is, we just don't know.
"We do know, from where we're sitting, that you can pass on the data in a far more transparent way," Bacon adds. "These days, you can use your mobile phone in the middle of Africa and right away you can find out how long you've been on it and what you've been charged. With us, artists know exactly what they get. They know what they're going to get paid and when. The labels can't tell us what we'll get from Spotify, cause they don't know yet. For God's sake, they're not trying to decipher the human genome."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Wiley's Ustream is more addictive than any music journalism
Fancy seeing Wiley jogging in the park? Arguing on the phone? Sitting around in a vest? He's been filming himself for the last few days and we can't take our eyes off it
"Your day will pass and you'll just be another person on the internet" – Wiley, on Ustream, two hours ago.
Right now one of Britain's most talented, eccentric and least appreciated musicians is broadcasting live to an audience of 192. He's been on-screen for the best part of the last two days and is – whether he knows it or not – helping to kill the practice of music journalism stone cold dead.
Wiley, a notoriously unpredictable grime producer and MC, has been filming himself for the last 48 hours and has provided more great quotes than you could squeeze into ten years of PR-led junkets. From advice on how to break the music biz ("Wiley's quite human, 'cos actually he puts his ear out and he listens to more than the others do. No-one don't show Skepta shit, because you know he don't give a shit and he won't listen.") to musings on religion ("Just wake up and live your life until you're dead. People get excited – 'We don't eat bacon. We don't eat that or this. We eat soya meat sausages. SOYA MEAT SAUSAGES'. Don't hype about bacon or beef or whatever. Fuck's sake bruv.") to his thoughts on hip hop today ("Eminem is the best battle rapper signed today. Mike Skinner though, he might make Eminem stop and listen.") this is Wiley – constantly honest, weird, dumb and, ultimately, just plain exciting.
In the last ten minutes he's given out his personal email, previewed snippets of works-in-progress and conducted business meetings over the phone – right now he's chatting about working with Nicki Minaj and Giggs. Before that he took the camera out to the park, left it on the grass and jogged off just to "see if anyone will nick it". Nothing I write can do it justice. Nothing can stop me watching.
You can't predict Wiley. The man who impulsively gave away the whole of his last album (and more) via Twitter because of a management tiff might get bored with Ustream as quickly as he logged onto it. So catch him while you can because this is the most open, frank profile of a musician you're going to see for a very long time.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - An unexpected Prom date with Beyoncé and her Single Ladies
What happened when Mark-Anthony Turnage brought R&B to the conservative hallows of the BBC Proms?
It began with a bang: skirling woodwind and dissonant brass fury. Nothing that unusual for a BBC Proms world premiere. But then audience members at the Royal Albert Hall last Thursday suddenly sat up. Some rooted through their programmes, looking vainly for confirmation; others glanced around in disbelief. Were they hearing this right? Was the esteemed BBC Symphony Orchestra really playing Beyoncé's Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)?
The piece in question was Hammered Out, by 50-year-old British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage He is well-known for his love of jazz, funk and soul, and had promised influences from James Brown and Tower of Power. The only clues that this piece might carry anything more concrete were coy hints in interviews with BBC Radio 3 – "there are a couple of hidden things, but I'd quite like other people to find them out rather than me saying them" – and his publisher – "this is my most R&B work to date".
Turnage told me he put the Beyoncé reference in as a nod to his young son, Milo, who loves dancing to Single Ladies, but it's more than just a quote. Indeed, the riffs and rhythms of the pop source infect every aspect of the orchestral work.
So was it really that hidden? Every audience member I've spoken to spotted the reference immediately. Yet, surprisingly, Turnage says he thought it would go largely unnoticed. To an extent he was right: none of the press reviews mention Beyoncé, although critics may have assumed that their ears were deceiving them. In rehearsals some of the younger players made the spot, but agreed to keep it to themselves. In the event, the Proms audience were hipper than even Turnage gave them credit for.
The post-publicity became a minor online sensation: those same concertgoers used the BBC iPlayer to post comparisons on Facebook, and soon Turnage/Beyoncé mash-ups began appearing on YouTube. The composer is amused and surprised by the coverage the piece has received, but it was a perfect internet storm: a punchy, subversive and entertaining countercultural meme that travelled easily across blogs and Twitter feeds. Possibly a first for contemporary classical music.
From the jazzy Blood On the Floor (1996) to his forthcoming opera, Anna Nicole (based on the life and death of glamour model Anna Nicole Smith), Turnage has rarely missed an opportunity to subvert the mores of the classical establishment with influences from the popular end of the musical spectrum. Hammered Out receives its American premiere in Los Angeles on 13 November with the LA Philharmonic. The word is out now, and it will be interesting to see how the audience at the Disney concert hall reacts to this particular cross-cultural mix.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music video: Cee-Lo Green – Fuck You
Cee-Lo Green cunningly used a sparkling Motown backdrop to infiltrate pop culture with potty-mouth language – now here's the video
You may know Cee-Lo Green from his days with hip-hop collective the Goodie Mob, or from his two solo albums, or, most likely, as the guy from Gnarls Barkley with the voice that could shatter glass from a hundred feet. This first single from his forthcoming album, The Ladykiller, showcases that voice in such a way that the initial sweary novelty value of the song title (which also makes up most of the chorus) disappears as he makes it sound almost joyful. Rather than wallow in self-pity after his girlfriend leaves him, Cee-Lo signals he's moving on in a modern way. Despite its title, expect Fuck You to be sung by everyone from teenagers on the bus and parents in the supermarket to your grandparents at a wedding.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Does Nicolas Jaar's music defy description?
The New Yorker blends electronic music with Ethiopian jazz and South American rhythms, but refuses the ethno-techno tag. So how to describe his debut single, The Student?
What do you call Nicolas Jaar's music? The 20 year-old American may be closely associated with New York's Wolf + Lamb label, but the music he makes has only a tangential relationship with house or techno. For his debut release, The Student (you can listen to his music here), Wolf + Lamb had to request Jaar underscore this crumbling meditative piano piece with a beat, to give it dancefloor traction. Meanwhile, the man himself often takes his live club sets down to a jarringly slow 70bpm, interested, as he is, in creating atmosphere and emotional resonance, rather than physically moving the crowd.
"I never really made club music until I started playing in clubs," explains Jaar (pronounced "jar"). "For me, electronic music didn't equal dance music." Indeed, this young producer, around whom there is currently the sort of excitement that the nascent Villalobos or Aphex Twin once enjoyed, has some deeply idiosyncratic ideas about clubs and club music.
Jaar talks of dance music accelerating and shrinking through the 1990s; increasing in speed but narrowing its emotional range, in the process becoming a one-dimensional, escapist soundtrack. The attitude, he says, was: "Let's forget about 'the system', because capitalism won." Personally, he sees nightclubs as forums for a far richer, far more variegated experience.
As befits the son of Chilean visual artist Alfredo Jaar, he explores clubbing at a conceptual level. Clubs, Jaar feels, are about escape, but there is a sadness implicit in that "separation and forgetting". That people need nightclubs is an indictment of ordinary day-to-day life. "Everyone who goes to a club is heartbroken, I think. You can take that two ways. They're heartbroken, so they want to forget. Or they're heartbroken, so let's give them an ambience where they can be heartbroken." Better still, why not give them both? Jaar has talked about his desire to create "rhythmic anguish": music that you can dance to, with uncomplicated joy, but which is full of melancholy "above the bass".
Moreover, if clubs are places for breaking free, then, says Jaar, the soundtrack should reflect that structurally. "If the music, within itself, is about breaking and separation, then the club experience becomes meta, bigger, and it's very fulfilling." He pauses: "Maybe. I'm trying it out."
Little wonder, given that modus operandi, that Jaar's music refuses easy categorisation. Where others, aged 14, would have heard Villalobos's Thé Au Harem d'Archimède or Trentemøller's The Last Resort and simply tried to mimic them, Jaar wants to match them. He aspires to the originality of the former, and the emotional heft of the latter. Indeed, it's entirely different influences: Erik Satie, Keith Jarrett or Mulatu Astatke's Ethiopian jazz, that are useful reference points for Jaar's most extreme music. Tracks such as The Student or Dubliners are fraught reveries, ambient enigmas, auditory hallucinations of fumbling, tumbling double-bass; stark, poignant dabs of manipulated piano; chirruping percussion and environmental noise. Danceable rhythms and yearning voices drift in and out of the mix, almost whimsically, like restless ghosts in the machine.
If, in rhythmic terms, such tracks tantalise, the likes of El Bandido or Mi Mujer deliver. They have a funk impetus, a loose, fluid grooviness, a radiant and distinctly Latin American rhythmic lightness. Yet, even then, Jaar's music retains an otherness. His unlikely club hit, Time for Us, is what? A screwed, slow-mo R&B banger? "Things might have to slow down for us to be conscious of them," says Jaar, "as opposed to making them so fast we're just escaping with them."
Of course, some people don't buy it. Non-believers have dismissed Jaar's work, and its "world music" elements, as a lazy continuation of the La Mezcla ethno-house trend. Jaar, who grew-up in Santiago de Chile, insists such sounds are encoded in his DNA: "I lived in Chile, I have French and Arab heritage. The last thing I have is American or German electronic influences. I don't know how to make techno. I don't know how to make that perfect kick." For the record, he describes the welding of "ethnic" samples to western beats as: "Literally, the most disgusting thing that can happen to music. It's colonisation all over again."
When the Inès album arrives in October, on Clown and Sunset – Jaar's collaborative label with his Russian and Ethiopian friends, Nikita Quasim and Soul Keita – there will still only be 20 or so of his tracks in circulation. Completed between university classes (comparative literature at Brown University) and gigs at Fabric and Berlin's Bar 25, they, none the less, already constitute a fascinating body of work.
Jaar thinks it's "humbling" anyone should care, and is so carried away with the hype that, naturally, he's thinking about staying at college, and doing a master's degree. Clearly, he is a musician apart. But are you excited by Jaar's music? And, if not, which young bloods are rocking your world?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Ask the indie professor: Are gender stereotypes still present in indie music?
Indie likes to pride itself on having an enlightened sense of gender relations. But that doesn't stop female audience members from being groped at shows
I've often thought that indie kids try to purport a more enlightened sense of gender relations between themselves (the boys and the girls dress really similarly, for example). Is this the case, and is their subculture some kind of equality-based utopia? Or are gender stereotypes still present but instead played out in a different way?
GuidedByVealWithout a doubt, indie has a more enlightened sense of gender relations than many musical genres. You can see this in a number of areas, such as pioneering co-ed bands (Pixies, Arcade Fire, Lush, the White Stripes, Elastica, My Bloody Valentine, Quasi, Slowdive, the xx , Autolux, Beach House, the Kills, feel free to carry on) and the blending of gender-coded imagery where androgyny has been consistent in clothing and physicality. Blur didn't write "Girls who are boys, who like boys to be girls, who do boys like they're girls, who do girls like they're boys" for nothing. Androgyny can even been seen in the common use of falsetto by male singers as a higher register is usually associated with femininity. The blending of gender imagery is common in rock and pop, but the central value of equality, even between performers and audience has made humanist gender relations the ideal in indie.
However, in practicality, indie does not exist in some parallel universe. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen female musicians ignored in interviews. Additionally, female spectatorship and fanship is sexualised. There is an assumption if you are female at a show that you are sexually available to performers. Just earlier this year, on Jeopardy (a popular game show in the US), university student Lindsay Eanet said she would like to be a music journalist like the fictional character William Miller (from Almost Famous, based on the experiences of Cameron Crowe writing for Rolling Stone). The host said, "Oh, so you want to be a groupie?" As she explained that she wanted to be a professional journalist, he once again mouthed to the camera "groupie". Of course, it implies all female professionals are there to get guys in bands (like this is such a hard thing – seriously, you don't need to work in the music industry to get laid). This assumption that audiences are filled with sexually overwhelmed girls is belied by the fact that for rock and metal as well as for indie the audiences are disproportionately male.
At indie shows, you still see gender distinctions in distribution patterns and activities. Women tend to stand right at the front and by the speaker stacks, rarely in the central area where dancing might happen. Groping is absolutely taboo, yet women are still loathe to crowd surf because it only takes one jerk in an audience to violate a woman which limits her ability to participate in audience activities available to males. During my research I've been told by countless women that they refrained from crowd-surfing and most of them (including myself) had been groped at shows (interestingly, both men and women came to my defence – this is a typical tale from many female audience members). After that happens, they often chose a different location or move further back so it won't happen again.
The restriction of female participation was part of the rationale for stopping stage diving and discouraging crowd-surfing. British indie has been – and still is – consistently and significantly more egalitarian in terms of gender relations than America. In the noughties, when indie aesthetics overtook alternative music in the US, it ostensibly produced more female equality. The musical points of reference moved from "aggressive" to "fey" and "effeminate" – in line with UK bands of the 1980s and 90s. With indie, the feminine body and voice replaced the punk rockism of grunge and Riot Grrrl.
However, even in 2006, when Pitchfork reviewed my book on the culture of indie music, the writer actually talked about my cleavage! Always something you want to include in a review of a female author's book. I'd like to say it's a big topic that needs more discussion, but if I did that, someone might call me a tease.
If you have a question for the indie prof, please leave a comment below or email her at theindieprofessor@gmail.com
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Lady Gaga – Living On the Radio
The lampshade-wearing singer reveals a new song about the toils of being a global pop phenomenon
Of the few things we know about Lady Gaga, we can be sure of the following: she has been on the road a fair bit over the past year; her songs can be heard on the radio; and she loves being famous. So it's no surprise whatsoever that the Gags has turned her songwriting attention to these three things. "Living on the radio, that's my dream", she sang on stage in Minnesota last night, before describing a life of "caviar, champagne and sold-out shows". Cryptic stuff, right? Live, the song proved to be a melancholy piano ballad, but we're willing to bet our last pair of Alexander McQueen 10-inch heels that Living On the Radio will come with a banging, Euro-pop backing track by the time it's released.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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