Avril fans put into deep freeze

It's always annoying when bands fail to turn up on time. Even worse, though, when you're waiting in a blizzard.

Avril Lavigne had her fans hang about in the snow for forty minutes before... well, making them wait a little longer as a woman from Best Buy droned on about her albums to fill time when she still didn't show up. She did come on stage eventually, but not in time to spare her fans from turning blue.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

Rachel Summers observes the fangirls:

Many fangirls seem to be suffering from the delusion that they know their idols; they've read every interview and seen every video clip of them possible, how could they not? The reality, of course, is that even with the most candid and accessible performer, one is often only seeing a fraction of who that person actually is. To believe that one's 'fan knowledge' of a person equals the knowledge that their parents, lovers, friends, doctors, lawyers, managers, etc, have of them is most definitely delusional.

The Sunday Times is granted an audience with Emmy The Great:

“If you look at someone’s entire songwriting output, if all those things happened to them, they’d be dead. If you write about only things that ‘happen’ to you, you’ll write, ‘I went to the post office today and delivered my package / And then I went home and watched television’.”
(Which kind of sums up some of the mockney-fied street poetry being peddled at the moment, but I let the thought go.)

Powells.com meets Oliver Sacks as he publishes Musicophilia:

Whether music piggybacks on speech or visa versa, or whether they were separate evolutions, people will argue every way. And of course Steven Pinker, after people like William James, see music as trivial and incidental, "auditory cheesecake," which I don't go along with. Music is central in every culture. So much of the brain is recruited in its service, for perception or imagination. Musical instruments go back fifty thousand years.

I think of what Mendelssohn said: "In some ways, music is more precise than language." It's the other form of communication.

As Facebook tries to get some MySpace style band action, Techcrunch compares the official offering with the iLike app:

So if you are a music artist, you now have to make a decision: Do you go with the iLike page as your main Facebook page (and take advantage of the nearly 10 million members who use the iLike app), or do you go with your own advertiser page on Facebook? Case in point: the new Facebook page for 50 Cent (shown left) had only three fans when it first went up just after midnight, compared to 1.2 million fans on his iLike page on Facebook.

Kasabian: British fans are rubbish

Apparently, Kasabian love their European fans more than their British fans because on the continent, they don't think they're third-rate copyists:

Serge said: "I think the fans get us more abroad than in the UK because we don't get any of that crap where we're 'whaaay' lads and we 'ave it and all that."

"The foreign fans listen to the music more and don't call us The Stone Roses or anything.

"I think they get us for who we are, especially in France and places like that. There's no baggage like in the UK."

Serge then conceded that, perhaps, they do dress like 'whaay lads who 'ave it and all that':

"We're just musicians at the end of the day who happen to like wearing good clothes."

So, this seems to boil down to Serge thinking that British fans don't - oh yes - give Kasabian the respect he feels they deserve. But perhaps fewer people would describe Kasabian as third-generation xeroxes if, erm, they weren't third-generation xeroxes.

We imagine that Serge is also a little confused - the people who call Kasabian here aren't fans; as anyone who's ever criticised Kasabian can testify, there are plenty of British people who are convinced they're the very acme of rock prefection. But in Europe, the only people he's likely to come across are fans - we're not sure how good Pizzorno's French is, but we bet he doesn't spend his time with a Harraps translating general French music websites which are probably just as sceptical as the general UK ones.

"Shakira fans are the worst"

Just in passing, an amusing aside from Tony Hicks of the Contra Costa Times on how the internet has now expanded the global reach of hate mail directed at provincial press music reviewers.

[UPDATE: We're hoping that the Internet Archive still holds this piece, but it's not working at the moment]

The most sensational... inspirational... muppetnational... this us what we call a joke, you Weezer fans

This is possibly the best thing we've come across on Blogcritics so far - a survey of the response of Weezer fans when someone posted a spoof article about the ramifications of Miss Piggy-Weezer drummer sex. It's scary mainly because we've always had Weezer pegged as one of the brighter acts in the pop firmament, and so have always asumed that their fanbase would be drawn more from the bookcase end of the classroom rather than down in the sandtray. Shows what we know, doesn't it?