Rockin Friday!

Hello again, and welcome to another edition of Rockin Friday!

It’s been a while, and unfortunately not a whole lot of underground stuff for you today. Next week I think I’ll look into how to rip iPods and whatnot, but for now just a bunch of random stuff.

Now bear with me American readers, as I will talk about two British music festivals. The first of these is Glastonbury, which is so famous it may even be known across the Pond. But otherwise, it is an annual festival, mainly populated by indie bands although it has plenty of other acts too. It runs for 3 days, and attracts a massive crowd every year, being the biggest greenfield festival in the world. This years festival has sparked some debate by announcing a certain rapper as the main headline act.

There we have Jay-Z wearing a wonderful pink sweater. Now, of course, announcing a rapper as the headline act at an indie festival is going to cause some issues, and many people have vowed to boycott the event. While I don’t blame them for not paying for an act they wouldn’t want to see, some of the fuss people have been making is a bit OTT, and in fact some people have been calling them up for prejudice and racism. Perhaps that’s reading a little too much into it, but they certainly have a point about them not being open-minded enough.

Now, my next festival is a perhaps less well known rock festival called Donnington Download. (It used to be known as Monsters of Rock if that’s more well known). Now, in their own words, it is a punk rock/heavy metal festival (I may have paraphrased slightly), but in all honesty it’s a primarily heavy metal gig. So imagine the furor when last year MCR and Linkin Park were announced as headline acts besides the legendary Iron Maiden. Now, both bands were bottled and booed, as both are understandably tagged as ’emo’, which is, of course, a major offense to all things heavy metal. Now don’t get me wrong, I personally have nothing against the two bands, and in fact enjoy some of their songs. I think it was wrong of the organisers to have them as headline acts when you look at the calibre of some of the bands supporting them (Megadeth, Machine Head, Slayer, etc). But what can you do? Throw piss at them? I’d rather enjoy the show to be quite honest.

This year, alongside the equally legendary Kiss we have Lostprophets and the Offspring, two bands which I actually thoroughly enjoy. But in similar fashion, this has kicked up a major fuss, what with Lostprophets being ’emo’ (Listen to their first two albums and tell me that!) and the Offspring not really being a metal band. Ah well, some people are blinded by their prejudice, be they gansta wannabes, indie kids or metalheads, and they’re unlikely to change soon.

(Lostprophets in full swing at one of their more recent shows)

That’s all for this week. Next week I’ll hopefully have something a little more underground for you, in fact I have something in mind. But otherwise enjoy your weekend and this fairly old song I recently rediscovered!

Rock on! \m/