Your update from the gentlemen upstairs...
This has been a bit of red letter week at The Quietus office. Not only did we receive copies of Renegade, Mark E Smith's autobiography and finished copies of The Fall's new album 'Imperial Wax Solvent' but we got to see his nibs sitting in a darkened corner of the Cobden Club, near Kensal Rise, cackling like an evil creature of the night and signing copies of his book - only to do a runner when it was time for him to do a reading.
What with the gallons of red wine there and at the launch of our fab sister site The Lipster it's a wonder we got any copy published at all. However we've done well this week.
Yeah, we've tempted Mr Taylor Parkes out of retirement to write about the aforementioned Fall album. His feature length piece only raises one question: why aren't the editors of the broadsheets beating a path to his door? Their loss is our gain.
http://www.thequietus.com/2008/04/the-fall-imperial-wax-solvent-review/
Also up is Derek Walmsley from WIRE magazine and his cogent and impassioned defence of the very often misunderstood Jay-Z.
http://www.thequietus.com/2008/04/black-sky-thinking-in-defence-of-jay-z/
Elsewhere the fantastically offensive Mr Agreeable has delicious bile filled rants to get your weekend off to a good start:
http://www.thequietus.com/2008/04/mr-agreeable-takes-your-pork-pie-hat-with-chutney/
And then there's the fantastically derranged story of German film maker Uwe Boll courtesy of Mr Andrew Stimpson.
http://www.thequietus.com/2008/04/a-profile-of-uwe-boll/
We've also got the lovely Mr Stevie Chick on hip hop, Adam Alphabet on Gonzales, DiS' very own Alex Denney on The Last Shadow Puppets, Luke Turner on Portishead and Jeremy Allen on sleep deprivation. All of them gentlemen of letters to a man.
Anyway it would be good to hear what you think and please invite all of your friends to join this group.
Now, we're away to the Imaginarium for a pint of bitter top.
Have a good weekend.
tQ.
amusingly
that post reminds me of prole's rant about that newspaper article on how women and men are DIFFERENT and women like certain things and are all emotional and men are record collecting geeks who need DATA.
the lipster/the quietus
was my point.
Not sure
I totally understand what you're going on about. I burst into tears at the merest mention of Slayer and Jude Rodgers is a cold-hearted fact-monger.
oh it was more
something someone else was going on about. please feel free to ignore.
Yeah
I was going to ask about this whole boy/girl thing. Is it intentional?
what boy/girl thing?
i wouldn't normally pipe up, but i see no obvious reference to a division of whatever here, but yet you and Mr JS have alluded to something. i can't even articulate this properly due to that fact and i am mostly confused by the comments (maybe I should search the boards, but i haven't got time). do you mean that only boys are supposed to read theQuietus and only girls are supposed to read the Lipster?
theQuietus seems pretty good to me so far but not from it being a "Bloke" thing - they just cover more of what i want to read versus some of the stuff here on DiS. unless i've been suckered in? gasp! off for an ale now and to watch the football.
Sorry, maybe i'm just being a bit sensitive and right-on
but John Doran makes reference to demographics in the Quietus 'About' page, mentioning DiS mainly being read by teens and 20-somethings. The Lipster is described as "a website full of pop culture content for women like [Jude Rogers and Rebecca Nicholson]". The implication in my mind is that The Quietus is therefore made for men of a certain age.
Maybe i'm giving the general public too much credit. Maybe, to run a successful business, catering to these demographics simply makes sense. But it seems a shame that all three of these publications should strive for such intelligent and well-meaning output whilst making such sweeping concessions.
No.
Try and write about one of those other 'markets' on this site (disgusting as the term is) and the response from the DiS intelligentsia is absolutely appalling.
Pigs stay in their own shit.
For fuck's sake
Every time i try to write a long post, some advert thing happens which interrupts my writing. If i don't notice this and press delete then this causes the browser to go back through the web pages. So to write a post, i have to use Word or notebook or something, then copy and paste.
DiS - THIS IS REALLY ANNOYING
.
It's my birthday today.
happy birthday.
ta
My response to your request for thoughts
I don't really get the Mr Agreeable article. Is it the 'classic format' of an angry person ranting at the world being really funny? Am i missing something?
The Uwe Boll article seems to have been written by someone who isn't really into video games. I could be wrong, but is this the case?
Maybe i'm in the wrong target demographic, or maybe i had unreasonable expectations of the format. The subject matter is quite satisfying, but the execution just seems a little lightweight. I don't know if it's the presentation, the inheritance of a blog-like style, whatever, but it all seems to be something to fill in some spare time rather than something that i'd look forward to reading.
Don't mean to be a h8er an all.
The Swells piece on Glastonbury is quite good, the Walmsley one less so (but still a subject worth discussing, so fair enough).
Oh, and seriously, what's the deal with this Lipster/Quietus thing? Is it really DiS for teenage boys, Lipster for the laydeez and Quietus for the 'guys'? I can't believe that i'm even asking this question.
mr agreeable was
in melody maker about 200 years ago.
it wasnt funny then either.
I just read that thing
that you wrote about DiS/quietus on their 'About' page. Having listed Mike Diver, Sam Strang, Kev Kharas, Alex Denny and Gareth Dobson, it seems to me that saying 'different writers' goes beyond disingenuous.
well yes obviously those ones the same
i just thought it was weird at the time that rather than getting all the new big names on that list to contribute here to make DiS better, sean decided to start on a new projects. i just find the whole demographic marketing malarkey a bit silly. mike's article on math rock for instance is more indepth than some of the long quietus articles... why two sites?
but the debates been done
over there really. there's some good stuff on the site. good luck to em.
Yeah, fair play
If i thought that it was terrible then i wouldn't have even bothered looking any further, so i'm actually sort of trying to put in some genuine feedback.
Good luck to em indeed.
Hahaha.
"We want to make the point that we think bands like Joy Division, The Smiths, Public Enemy, Wu Tang Clan, My Bloody Valentine, LCD Soundsystem, The Fall, PJ Harvey, Kraftwerk, Carl Craig, Can, Suede etc etc are just as important as bands like The Beatles, Bob Dylan or the Stones."
That sounds like its written by one of those loser old men that missed the 60s, missed the early 70s and is really obsessed with post-punk and that boring period, and so spends their time trying to convince everyone it was some really amazing, important time. Sorry, but it really wasn't. They've basically been responsible for producing bands like The Wombats, and other such tripe by students who think their music taste is impeccable because they like The Fall, and The Fall don't even SING! :O
Good luck indeed. You'll need it.
i'm pretty sure i've never read
a post by you that doesn't make you sound like a complete moron
That's an easy one theseabass
It's because he's never written a post that doesn't make him sound like a complete moron.
Its ok
he's like the village idiot, you shouldn't actually be bothered about anything he says cos he doesn't know any better, or he's like Racist Grandparent he can say some terrible things but everyone just nods and smiles knowing that there is no point saying anything as it'll just cause a scene.
LCD Soundsystem =/= Wombats
i don't get
what's quite so hard to understand. dis is one kinda site, with a certain style and taste. no-one is forcing anyone to read any of the other sites but we know that some people here might and do like some of the other sites which i'm behind.
i dont like any of them
not even DiS
^ masochist