Dull-ish Festive Fifty - it's still a throwback!

[hemlyn2003]

Let me start by stating that I love the Peel show, and have done for 
more years than most people on this list have been breathing...etc

OK, with that out of the way, let me rant.  I grieve because this 
year's Fifty, like most, is still dominated by throwback guitar-
oriented music.  Why?  A few of yer guitary bands are definitely 
worth having around, like Meltbanana (unbelievable), Mogwai (OK), the 
New Rawk likes of the Stripes & Vaults (in small doses
very small), 
and Super Furry Animals - but, please, spare me the goddamn Fall (who 
were going places....20 years ago), Belle & ThatLot, The Underarms 
(see Fall comment), Half Man Ho Ho Yes I Suppose, and most of the 
rest....it's a litany of yesterday, and it annoys me intensely.  

Listen up, your Noo Rawk is not Noo, it's old.  It's recycled, like 
leaves on a compost heap.  It originated from old blues guys along 
the Mississippi a long time ago, and was then filtered through the 
likes of Eric Claptout in the sixties.  **The bloody sixties.**   
Don't you think its time to leave all that behind?  

Did you know, a near-completely-new form of music kicked off in the 
late 1980s - house (let's call it post-1988) music.  Love it or hate 
it, it is the music of **your** times.  House changed all the rules, 
opened huge new horizons, and spawned dozens of living, evolving 
genres in a dramatically short time.  Peelie remains one of the few 
national radio DJ figures really to have grasped the significance of 
it all, and is, happily, able to apply his extensive experience to 
the essential task of quality control applied to the post-'88 music 
he plays.  And I can tell that he just loves dropping in the 
weirdest, biggest, least accessible and most outrageous post-'88 
tracks in his programme to make people jump and plant the seeds of 
the new in his listeners' minds – I really do.  And I love `em
.

The post-'88 music tracks that he plays are *always* the most 
interesting, innovative and going-somewhere selections on the whole 
show, week in week out.  They're challenging, they're not safe, they 
don't happen in a predictable manner, they take some effort to get 
into, and they probably don't sound like your big brother's record 
collection (sorry), but they do new things to you and take you to 
places you've never been before.  Can you handle that?  

So it disappoints me when I see a Festive Fifty like that
.again.  I 
ain't gonna stop listening to Peel, but I do wonder about what seems 
to be much of his audience.  (Or at least the voting proportion of 
it.)  Sorry



The landscape of the post-1988 revolution is still settling down, and 
a lot of people are trying to catch up with it all - hence the 
current musical retrenchment, visible everywhere and not just in the 
Peely 50 (notably, for instance, in the British `NME' music weekly, 
which is delighted to have blokes waving guitars to take pictures of -
 once again.  Zzzzzzzzz


.).  

But no musical form other than 'post-88' is *actually going places* 
in the medium- and long-term.  If you listen to recycled sounds of 
the past, good for you, and enjoy them – but for what they are: 
exactly that.  But why not catch up full-bloodedly with the music of 
the twenty-first century?