Talking Pop Tag

It’s a Thursday night and I am bored and slightly angry. I am not sitting alone at home. I am not bored because I have no one to interact with. Fun fact, I am at a party. I know plenty of people here and I am having a good time with free drinks, nice catch up talks, small talk and so on. I am not complaining about the occasion – it’s the aftershow party of the German Echo music awards – I actually like being here. The show was awfulRead More

Avant Gardener has been running on my laptop, phone and whatever device I use to listen to music too for days now. But why can’t I let this song go? I wanted to include the song in a list of different songs. But I couldn’t come up with a proper topic I felt worth talking about. I must have played this song more than a hundred times since I came across it in the monthly Birp playlist. And after hours of listening it is starting to make sense why IRead More

Everything is a fucking show. Everybody needs a fucking mass of background dancers, remixers, mash-ups, fireworks and symbols, pop-culture references, brand tie-ins and codes. The biggest popstars try to make an event out of everything. You have a new album coming out? Cool, let’s just not tell anybody and make it appear over night then. You haven’t released any music for some time but you need a reason to go on tour again and grab a couple of millions? Why not release a new album in order to have aRead More

How the music industry needs to learn from their youngest audience.  First of all, I’m not really old yet. But in terms of rock and pop music hall of fame, I’ve reached the pinnacle. The year I should say farewell via overdose (which I can’t do because I don’t do drugs), gun to your head (quite difficult this one as well, as German laws on guns are very strict) or alcohol (ok, I do drink, but I never take any medication with it). I don’t see it happening, whichRead More

In this installment of Talking Pop, author Carlo is talking about his love for Florence And The Machine. How she’s been haunting him since her first single and why music is always so closely connected to ones own biography. I’m sitting in my parents living room in 2009. The tv is on, and a Swiss television station is running. It’s sometime in the afternoon and instead of sitcoms or talkshows, they are showing music videos. There’s this one video with flowers in front of a white backdrop. A red hairedRead More

I know that we haven’t talked about pop music in quite a while. I mean, we all do love our indie, punk, noise or whatever influenced bands that play the crappiest venues all to be able to release some tunes recorded in their bedrooms or garages via bandcamp or on small run vinyl. But from time to time there is an urge and a void that can only be filled by massive pop tunes. Tacky hooklines that block your ears for days and nights, one-liners that make you long forRead More

Summer 2006. I spent the summer in Barcelona in a desperate attempt to improve my Spanish. I ended up going out a lot more than I ever did before, I probably drank a lot more than I should have, I didn’t sleep as much as one should have over the course of my time there and I probably improved my English more than my Spanish. But I also met a lot of great people. This trip was the reason for me to go to study in the UK and forRead More

Sod all the other polls and tip sheets out in January – if you want something to pore over and actually get you excited about music in 2014, then read this. So here we go again then. The wonderful english music tabloid NME has once again found the ones to watch for the new year. Here’s our take on the bands they think will make it big. Are they worth it? Should you care? Is there anything in there that’s exciting at all?Read More

Sod all the other polls and tip sheets out in January – if you want something to pore over and actually get you excited about music in 2014, then read this. So here we go again then. The wonderful english music tabloid NME has once again found the ones to watch for the new year. Here’s our take on the bands they think will make it big. Are they worth it? Should you care? Is there anything in there that’s exciting at all?Read More

Is the acceleration of our lives showing in music too? I think it definitely is. There’s no doubt about it that the internet and the resulting speed in which music has become widely available has also changed the way we consume music. With the likes of Soundcloud, Deezer or Spotify and Youtube we can now access nearly all the music we want at any given time. We are now consuming in small bits. We are scavaging blogs for the newest singles and artists or labels.Read More