nick nick music

Anyone else a bit obsessive about getting all their songs on iTunes properly ordered by genre?

Oh, just me then. Anyway, I like doing this, and I like sub-dividing my collection down into little genres (inventing new ones if necessary). Catch-all super-genres like 'Alternative' or 'Electronic'? Not me. I've got 'indie pop', 'indie rock', 'punk', 'post-punk', 'punk-funk', 'art-rock', '70s rock', 'krautrock', 'ambient', 'electronica', 'electro', 'house', 'tech-house' etc etc etc. Endless catagorisation-related fun. Still can't figure out where to put Bjork, though. At the moment she's under 'Bjork'.

I've got a new catagory to add courtesy of the Guardian today, mind, and I rather like it. Witness the birth of 'nick-nick music'.

Writing about his understandable enthusiasm for the Futureheads, John Harris notes that

I mentioned all this to the other day to a music journalist friend, who greeted my enthusiasm with a hiss of derision. "Oh, come on," he said. "That's just nick-nick music. It just goes nick-nick-nick." He was right, after a fashion. The Futureheads are emblematic of a strain of British music that dates back to the aftermath of punk rock (XTC, Gang of Four, et al), in which arty-farty intentions meld with the imperative to play loud and fast, modern mores are decried in a hail of staccato chords and weird time signatures, and the resultant noise does indeed go "nick-nick".

God, yeah, it does. Maybe I'll have to add that to my genre listings when i get back to Brighton.

The whole article is here, and it's quite good fun, as the below passage indicates.

"Britpop's fondness for a fun-for- all-the-family sense of inclusive enjoyment - compare Oasis's Digsy's Dinner, Blur's Parklife and Dodgy's Staying Out for the Summer - tended to lead to music that went "rinky dink-dink". The wave of anthemic balladry - Travis, Embrace, Starsailor - that followed in its wake could roughly be translated as "dum-dum-dum".