Look at that image, and listen to this song, and like me you might just come to the realisation that Kid Sister is surely destined to be a bona fide, proper, soon-to-be-sullied-by-a-guest-rap-from-Akon pop star.

Her songs are ravey enough for clubs but accessible enough for the pop charts, she’s collaborated with Kanye West already and she gets remixed by people so cool you haven’t heard of them. Although she has been “up and coming” for a while now, so let’s hope her moment hasn’t passed. Her album Ultraviolet is out in November.

While I’m being nice I’ll also apportion two and a half props to RCRD LBL, which not only showcases splendid music but is also the kind of site pilfering bloggers like me like a lot - they provide handy, easily-shareable wee widgets like that one up there.

Sounds simple, but it’s a notion that still escapes a lorra record companies…

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Monday October 19th, 2009 at 8:00 am

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Monday October 12th, 2009 at 8:00 am

We all know that Twitter is an invaluable way to let people know how deathly dull your life is, but the Twitgigs experiment this Thursday 6th August is an opportunity for you to try and convince your followers otherwise.

At The Vibe Bar in “London’s trendy Brick Lane” Twitgigs will be putting on a battle of the bands with acts sourced directly through Twitter. Punters in attendance choose the winner by sending in a postcard tweeting their votes, if they can tear their eyes away from the live Twitterfall updates that will be displayed around the gaff.

If you can’t make the night yourself (what do you mean you don’t live in London?!) you’ll be able to catch it live at ustream.tv, where presumably the possibility of watching a live stream of Twitter updates on one of the venue’s screens may present itself. I think watching live video streams of live Twitter streams could be the future, you know.

On the bill at Twitgigs will be bands with names like Essay Like Nephew (@essaylikenephew), Mike Dignam (@mikedignammusic) and The Seal Cub Clubbing Club (@wefuckinghateseals @thesccc). To get tickets in advance, go to this patch of internet.

You can follow the Twitgigs people themselves at @twitgigs, where they have a stream dedicated to live music in London.

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Tuesday August 4th, 2009 at 9:00 am

Do you miss Popworld? I do. It was a chucklesome nuggetoid of TV pop silliness with the ability to bring on the hungover gigglies, and it hasn’t really been replaced.

On television, anyway. But that doesn’t matter because only your gran watches TV nowadays, and even then it’s just when Antiques Ladder is on. For amusant pop-related funtimes these days one looks to the web, and once there one finds things like Sony Ericsson’s Pocket TV.

Taking the Popworld template of asking stupid questions to pop stars, Pocket TV is helmed by Holy Moly Amstell-lite talking person Matt Edmondson, and a jolly good job he does posing questions to people like The Enemy such as: “Have you ever fingered a kebab?”

It’s called Pocket TV because we’re all supposed to be watching video on our telephones these days, but you’re also allowed to watch it on your common-or-garden “home computing machine” as well. You should give it a go - you might see Lethal Bizzle shooting clay pigeons, N-Dubz being face invaded or, as below, dreadful “normal lad” dullards The Enemy pretending to be halfway interesting.

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Thursday July 30th, 2009 at 10:00 am

This video of music critic Christopher R. Weingarten from the 140 Characters Conference is priceless. It is precisely the opposite of what you expect from anything with the word “conference” in it. It is impassioned, funny, insightful, angry, honest and bullshit-free.

That it also effectively tells any aspiring music journalists to give up now due to the onset of Twitter & social media is kind of a shame, but he’s just calling it as he - and a lot of other people - see it.

Christopher R. Weingarten’s 1000TimeYes Twitter project

[via Hypebot]

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Monday June 22nd, 2009 at 1:00 pm

Wolfram Alpha got nerdlingers all tizzied up recently. It’s a new search engine whose aim is, modestly, to use its mad clevah algorithmix to “make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.”

What that means, as far as I can tell, is that Wolfram Alpha uses mathematics - previously thought to be our enemy, remember - to solve every question ever to plop out of the human dome.

Now clearly, the only questions we’re really interested in are those posed by pop stars through the ages. Questions like:

What becomes of the broken-hearted?

Who needs love like that?

Dancing at the disco bumper to bumper, wait a minute, where’s me jumper?

Excited at the prospect of finally having such queries answered, I probed Wolfram Alpha to within an inch of its bespectacled life. The results might politely be termed “mixed”.

Continue reading »

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Monday June 1st, 2009 at 9:00 am

[image: Evan Roth for F.A.T]

This is a guest post from the hella witty Kate Solomon:

Kanye West, it’s fair to say, is completely crazy in the coconut. Anyone who has read his blog cannot possibly disagree. It ranges from the painfully dull (U2 videos) to the NSFW (scantily-clad ladies asking ‘Where are you Yeezy?’ – beats me why they’re so keen on finding that penguin from Toy Story), but every eight pages or so he treats his faithful fans to twenty or so lines of pure ranty gold.

Here, for example, he’s PRETTY CHEESED OFF WITH TWITTER BIGWIGS!!!!!! SO IRRESPONSIBLE AND DECEITFUL ARE THEY FOR ALLOWING SOMEONE TO POSE AS HIM AND ACCUMULATE OVER A MILLION NAMES!!!!!!!! (followers, Kanyizzle, we call them followers).

Too few and far between are these wonderful outpourings. However, if you feel the need for more of this amazing caps-related, over-punctuated Kanye-style pontification in your life, help is at hand. That help is called Kanyefy, and it comes courtesy of a site called F.A.T. Just drag this handy button into your bookmark bar and hit it every time you need to increase your stress levels.

Twitter’s gentle inquiry “What are you doing?”, for example, soon becomes the slightly more accusatory WHAT ARE YOU DOING?????
Continue reading »

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Friday May 15th, 2009 at 1:29 pm

It’s a generally accepted fact that Courtney Love is battier than a big bat stew created in the Bat Cave from the battered remains of Batman, Nora Batty, David Batty and Batfink, mixed together with a cricket bat by Mike Batt, while Os Mutantes’ “Bat Macumba” plays in the background.

However it wasn’t until she stumbled into the world of social media, and started “enagaging directly with fans” (aka “providing easy stories for bloggers”), that we started to get fresh daily doses of Love.

First there was MySpace, but who had the endurance to read all those witterings, presented as they were sans spell-check, paragraphs, punctuation or rational thought?

Much nicer to get your Courtney in bite-size slices, as served up by 2009’s fave online timesuck, Twitter.

Nicer, but alas, no more comprehensible. I mean, really, what can you do with this?:

“real friend i dont pay” i should have just gotten raped bythe “interior decorator” as its costing ten times more than if i had!

One evening, as I sat whittling on my porch, I started wondering if perhaps Courtney’s tweets contained some kind of frothy-mouthed code which just required breaking in order to unleash the truth bombs contained thereinabouts.

Something in the syntax, the phrasing, the spelling and my own boredom told me that I should definitely try feeding Courtney Love’s Twitter updates through Babelfish Translator to see if they started to make any more sense.
Continue reading »

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Thursday May 7th, 2009 at 12:30 pm

Can you believe some people deride social news sites like Reddit as playgrounds for childish, overgrown adolescents?

See the whole thing here.

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Wednesday April 22nd, 2009 at 9:00 am

As you’ll be aware, we are now experiencing a post-Boyle entertainment landscape. Pre-Boyle, it was a commonly-held belief that non-pretty people were unable to sing - it was thought that the sheer weight of their ugly faces meant their mouths could not be held open long enough to complete a song.

Susan Boyle’s Britain’s Got Talent performance has opened the world’s eyes to the fact that, somehow, a beautiful voice can emerge from a middle-aged Scottish virgin lacking the physical traits of conventional attractiveness.

Imagine that! Looks have nothing to do with talent!
Continue reading »

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Monday April 20th, 2009 at 9:00 am