Amazing or the worst thing ever?

[The Curmudgeon]

For my next round of Your Verdict, I had planned on introducing the Fortress to the rather lovely Kate Nash.



She's a breath of fresh air in the pop world. Writes and plays her own songs, has a quirky, kooky personality that comes out in her lyrics (one song is about her best friend, a skeleton, for example) and she's a world removed from the likes of Rihanna and Beyonce.

Anyway, she's known for her piano based pop melodies, and the plan was to play you one of those. Things change, because Kate Nash has caused something of a media stir with her latest song, and it was a bit of a shock when she recorded and released (in the same day) a shouty, snotty, lo-fi rock song.

It pretty much split people in two camps. Some hailed it as "genius" and "amazing", like the NME, wheras Clash magazine called it a "vat of bullshit so foul smelling and deep that it will take a long time to clean."

So let's see what YOU think. Here's the opening NME article. Ignore the bullshit about what punk is/was/means (a bunch of corporate guys in suits in the 70s? Pardon??) and take a listen.

www.nme.com/blog/index.php?blog=1&p=12372&title=why_kate_nash_has_outpunked_punk&more=1&c=1

For the record, her new tour is called the "Faster Pussycat Kill, Kill!" tour. I think I love her.

[trashcanman]

"Nothing punk about punk"? Then why was it called "punk"? A clone of The Yardbirds? Punk? Really? So punk wasn't punk, but that song was punker than punk which was never punk? And all without bothering to explain this mythical definition of something he doesn't believe in to anyone except for "drunk people at a house party"? What a fucking idiot.

Now the song. Cool. She is clearly deliberately trying to be punk, which isn't really punk, but I'm not the fucking musical genre police. Now the thing about punk is that is sounds shitty because the people making it had little musical ability. They sounded like shit when they sang because they didn't know how to sing. The music sounded sloppy as fuck because they played sloppy as fuck because they couldn't do better, or just didn't care enough to. Eric Clapton could not play a Greg Ginn solo and have it sound right. A great guitarist spends years and years perfecting his muscle memory to the point that they couldn't play a bad note if they tried. Ginn played the sloppiest and most awesomely tuneless solos because he couldn't bother learning scales and had hands like mine. Clapton could copy the notes, but he'd never get it to sound as fucking PUNK. Take it from a punk fanatic and not from some pretentious internet music snob whose never heard an argument about mosh pits versus slam pits in his life. Nash is clearly TRYING to sound punk, but it doesn't have that energy of somebody singing as hard as they fucking can and still sounding like shit, and the music has zero bite because it was probably played by people trying to sound punk and not people who are punk. Download some Black Flag tunes for reference.

This Nash girl seems familiar. Are you sure you haven't brought her up before or something? Anyways, I like her. She's not punk in any sense of the word, but I appreciate the earnest effort.