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

[London Scummer]

Let's not confuse Peel's programme's with the Festive 50 eh?

Peel is Peel and the Festive 50 is just an annual bit of fun 
involving his listeners.. to say you might stop listening to the 
shows because you don't like what you percieve his audience to be is 
well.. actually don't bother, do what the rest of us do, listen when 
you want to and do something else when you don't.. it's easy.

Often Peel is still the same for me.. sometimes the shows drift over 
and I just like the vibe and enthusiasm of the man himself and then, 
as you say, a track will come out and knock you sideways... for me it 
might have been the Black Keys.. amazing ... for you, something else 
more obviously 'post 88'. For others the Fall for the umpteenth 
time.. who share Peel's enthusiasm... that's what makes it special... 
Peel still creates the best radio you can hear..
Then there's the Festive 50.. only those of us who are a little bit 
more anal and involved are gonna vote, presumably a good proportion 
on the this list and what we get is the eclectic list that turns up, 
the tunes we can remember. It is true, that some of those 'post 88' 
tracks have knocked me sideways... but I'm damned if I can remember 
their bloody names... so sorry, I'll scribble down 'Have Love Will 
Travel' by The Black Keys.. white American boys with guitars... dats 
life... but Christmas is over... and I've bought another couple of 
titles from Amazon when my memory was jogged by the Festive 50.. 

Personally, I think Peel and the F50 is as 21st century as the 
come... certainly more than any other radio show I can think of..

HM



--- In peel@yahoogroups.com, "hemlyn2003" <christone@o...> wrote:
> 
> 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?