Una Mulally says no-one likes dance music anymore

electrogrimey

Article published in the Ticket:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/theticket/2011/0422/1224295204596.html

"The Kitchen nightclub reopened in the basement of the Clarence Hotel in Dublin recently. It should have been the biggest event in the capital’s nightlife in years, but very few people actually care about dance music in Ireland any more."

"Kids don’t seem to have the time or desire to listen to a seven-minute track and see if they like it. "

Discuss.

jtsuited

The Irish Times continues to get worse.

jtsuited

oh and the kitchen re-opening failure was because people who used to go to the kitchen don't miss it that much, and kids too young to have gone there before don't see the attraction in a U2 owned club.

wild_cat

She hasn't a clue of what's going on does she.

Logical Fallacy

Probably a lot more to do with the evolution of the dance scene, certain venues holding all the power and not a single sane person in the country thinking going to a club owned by a preachy midget is cool anymore.

**** off back to the Spiderman musical Bono.

As for Una, to be honest she makes a good living out of writing poorly thought out rubbish.

cheesemaker

Oh she thinks about it alright, it just turns out to complete garbage everytime.

Carl Sagan

Logical Fallacy wrote: »

Probably a lot more to do with the evolution of the dance scene, certain venues holding all the power and not a single sane person in the country thinking going to a club owned by a preachy midget is cool anymore.

**** off back to the Spiderman musical Bono.

As for Una, to be honest she makes a good living out of writing poorly thought out rubbish.

I don't know much about the scene to comment, but the bolded part is very true.

xdeletiax

the bit i dont get is when she says pop music is "more complicated" now and thats why everyone prefers it over any other type of music. im no pop historian but hasnt there always been pop producers around who are highly skilled in music theory/ music technology who have been innovators in their field- timbaland for example made music that was just as (prob more) "complex" as dr luke and will i am. more interesting (and more critical) article by simon reynolds at the guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/apr/14/balearics-ibiza-pop

the quietus thing he links too is worth reading too.

tbh i dont think iv ever read anything by una that hasnt made me cringe, she should stick to meaningless celeb banter.

cheesemaker

Basically the hipsters in London don't dance to pop but they do here zomg??!11

TechnoFreek

Who is Una Mulally? Pardon my ignorance

Logical Fallacy

TechnoFreek wrote: »

Who is Una Mulally? Pardon my ignorance

Bad journo and backer of hamstrung students with political aspirations.

CiaranMT

jtsuited wrote: »

The Irish Times continues to get worse.

wild_cat wrote: »

She hasn't a clue of what's going on does she.

IT has a few very interesting writers committed to finding new music, Jim O' Carroll being at the forefront. Unfortunately, someone had to subsume this windbag into their operations after the Tribune folded. IT must have drawn the short straw.

She wrecks my head.

Android 666

Hey everybody the kids are listening to pop music. Well here's a newsflash, the kid are and always have been fooking idiots. I was a fooking idiot when I was a kid. Everyone I know was a fooking idiot when they were kids. The thing is we occasionally had some okay taste in music. Pretending to like something ironically or because it's so bad it's good makes you an ever bigger fooking idiot than all the other fooking idiots out there.

leggo

electrogrimey wrote: »

Article published in the Ticket:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/theticket/2011/0422/1224295204596.html

"The Kitchen nightclub reopened in the basement of the Clarence Hotel in Dublin recently. It should have been the biggest event in the capital’s nightlife in years, but very few people actually care about dance music in Ireland any more."

"Kids don’t seem to have the time or desire to listen to a seven-minute track and see if they like it. "

Discuss.

Ridiculous quote. It says a lot about the Times' musical knowledge that this one sentence made it past the edit without anyone picking up on it.

90% of today's pop music is derived from dance that was underground five years ago.

People (in their masses) don't care about underground dance...but they never have...that's why it's underground.

If pop producers decide that is the way to go in 5 years...everyone will care about it then and whatever idiotic journalist is in her place will make the astute point that mainstream audiences don't listen to niche music of THAT time.

Be sure to read next week as they reveal: 'Unpopular artists fail to sell many records', exclusively in The Irish Times.

blogga

What is Una Mulally?

EarlERizer

TechnoFreek wrote: »

Who is Una Mulally? Pardon my ignorance

My thoughts exactly.......and I wont excuse my ignorance!! who the fook made her the leading authority on dance music?

In respect to the recent reopening of a bull$hit commercialised up its own ar$e club like the kitchen ,maybe it would be more accurate to claim that people just dont tolerate crap commercial airwave saturated sterile dance music anymore!!

Dance music of many genres spanning back 21 years n more is still very much in the hearts n ears of many people in Ireland (and beyond)

She'd have done herself no harm in researching her subject rather than basing her opinion on the muted response to one clubs 2nd roll of the dice! you need only refer to the almost weekly nights in places like "The Vaults" to see how popular good dance music is!

I guarantee if it was the re-opening of Sides DC,Asylum,Olympic,Ormond or the temple (in their true forms) she'd have been telling a completely different story!!


End note:The Irish Times is just a faux-snob tabloid ,each week we hear of more n more bad reportings.

CiaranMT

Una Mullaly:

She's not popular here, critically or in the traditional sense.

7 threads with mention of her, and only one overtly positive.

Scubadevils

I doubt the Kitchen reopened with the intention of attracting the old crowd back, surely they'd have the cop on to realise most of that lot are busy changing nappies or dealing with mid life crisis etc... I'd suspect they felt it would trade on its original 'legendary' status and pull in a new crowd, especially given the mixed bag of nights they have been offering - I hear the Friday dubstep was pulled after its first week?

Logical Fallacy

Scubadevils wrote: »

I doubt the Kitchen reopened with the intention of attracting the old crowd back, surely they'd have the cop on to realise most of that lot are busy changing nappies or dealing with mid life crisis etc... I'd suspect they felt it would trade on its original 'legendary' status and pull in a new crowd, especially given the mixed bag of nights they have been offering - I hear the Friday dubstep was pulled after its first week?

Yeah, pulled after one week, apparently they didn't like the music or some ****.

As far as i know the Saturday night gig for this week has been pulled as well.

They don't really seem to know what they want to do. I think they honestly expected people to flood in based off the fact that it's the Kitchen.

Dance music has seriously changed in the last 10 years though.

Android 666

She used to run a blog called Unarocks - I only know this after googling her name...

This is from her last post on her blog

Although the blog has allowed me to get a few gigs or whatever, and has been like a seperate title ("journalist AND blogger") I sometimes wonder *dons Carrie Bradshaw mask* how it may have actually hindered me in ways. This blog is very bitty and instant. I am a better writer, a more serious person, a deeper thinker, and more professional than it suggests. I think that rarely shines through because of whatever format or voice I have created. That kind of concerns me.

Obviously didn't concern her enough to start writing decent articles. Scuttering gobsheen...

And wtf is it with stupid bint young wan journalists from Ireland and Carrie fecking Bradshaw...

Is mise le key

Android 666 wrote: »

Hey everybody the kids are listening to pop music. Well here's a newsflash, the kid are and always have been fooking idiots. I was a fooking idiot when I was a kid. Everyone I know was a fooking idiot when they were kids. The thing is we occasionally had some okay taste in music. Pretending to like something ironically or because it's so bad it's good makes you an ever bigger fooking idiot than all the other fooking idiots out there.

I feel like such a fooking idiot............

Android 666

Is mise le key wrote: »

I feel like such a fooking idiot............

Why? Have you been listening to that old skool stuff ironically all this time?

Is mise le key

Android 666 wrote: »

Why? Have you been listening to that old skool stuff ironically all this time?

No, i just thought i would give the 'hardcore you know the score' CD on full locked in my ma's wardrobe a go & convinced myself it must be good if andy's into it:D

What a fookin idiot:)

Blisterman

Well I think she's right about the fact that music in general has become less defined by genre. The majority of acts out there are crossing boundaries. And it's hard to argue that superclubs and electronic music are anywhere as popular as they were in the 90's.

Everyone's moved over to listening to pop? Can't agree with that at all. In fact I think music audiences have become more discerning and segmented. How many acts formed in the past 10 years could sell out a stadium? Can't think of any.

Is mise le key

Blisterman wrote: »

Everyone's moved over to listening to pop? Can't agree with that at all. In fact I think music audiences have become more discerning and segmented. How many acts formed in the past 10 years could sell out a stadium? Can't think of any.

Miley cirus sold out the point, Lady gaga sold out the point, Glee are all sold out for this year in the point.

I think that makes it, pop music is being listened to by sell out audiences, in fairness.

Sacred_git

Logical Fallacy wrote: »

Yeah, pulled after one week, apparently they didn't like the music or some ****.

As far as i know the Saturday night gig for this week has been pulled as well.

They don't really seem to know what they want to do. I think they honestly expected people to flood in based off the fact that it's the Kitchen.

Dance music has seriously changed in the last 10 years though.

I nearly went in only to hear the music coming out from it, nothing like what was coming up from them steps back in the day, yes the scene has changed i realise this but it was total cheesy crap a couple of weeks ago, reminiscent of the teenagers djing in tripod these days!!
And as for the other post referring to Bono, that little midget opened possibly the best club ever in this land back in the day!!!!!!!!!!!!

What that place needs is for someone to go to Berghain in Berlin and check out whats being played there and then come back here and pump it out - that = success!!

Funky G

Logical Fallacy wrote: »

Yeah, pulled after one week, apparently they didn't like the music or some ****.

As far as i know the Saturday night gig for this week has been pulled as well.

They don't really seem to know what they want to do. I think they honestly expected people to flood in based off the fact that it's the Kitchen.

Dance music has seriously changed in the last 10 years though.

Agreed 100% and its changing faster than ever before.....

It is a pity whats happening with The Kitchen - I remember some friends telling me I went mad in there one night many moons ago - I think the club night was called Genius....correct me if i'm wrong....mental!

If a night is pulled after one attempt who have to ask yourself why and how? Is the club still open?

Simple - there isn't enough of the small pie to satisfy the big demand of the clubbing market. Years ago it was flyers, word of mouth, running down your call credit to text everyone in your mobile phonebook to get the crowd in.

Now - It's facebook, put a video of the club night on youtube, free texting on a mobile network until all your free texts are gone etc etc....

Plus, look at where the Kitchen is - It's in the middle of a touristic place called temple bar - where your competition as a club is The Purty Kitchen (which used to be called Bad Bob's) and Fitzsimons, amongst other places. All within a stones' throw of each other. All places that do cheesey music, have big flashing lights and posters to tell the crowd that they are open, kinda look busy....

But at the end of it, all the Kitchen has is two wooden doors....unless the outside of the venue has changed, this is how i remember the venue....

Most venues have to hit the nail on the head - its obvious by other people posting here that the Kitchen have hit there hands as opposed to the nail. If venue owners / operators don't see a crowd in the club, or a dancefloor full then it's panic button pressing time.

Plus the crowd have changed - the generation where i think we most have come from have been replaced with the ipod hugging dancing with my mobile phone while texting / facebooking brigade who want to be seen in the light as opposed to dancing in the dark and losing yourself for a few hours as was The Kitchen all those years ago....

The journo does write 99% b0LL0x in all fairness with this article - No one here thinks that girls aloud are good - auto-tuned to fcuk and not a decent note in either of their heads.

To quote her -
When Girls Aloud started churning out brilliant tracks by the British songwriting and production team Xenomania, it became okay to like pop music, principally because it was so good.

The only thing brilliant was that the mute button on my TV remote works brilliantly and that i can look at scantly clad young ladies without hearing them sing like running their fingers down a blackboard....

The only thing i can agree with her is the attention-span of most "clubbers" today

Quote -
Kids don’t seem to have the time or desire to listen to a seven-minute track and see if they like it. There’s a giddy yearning for instantaneousness. If it catches the ear after 20 seconds, the job is done. And pop music is the genre most friendly to that.

Blisterman

Is mise le key wrote: »

Miley cirus sold out the point, Lady gaga sold out the point, Glee are all sold out for this year in the point.

I think that makes it, pop music is being listened to by sell out audiences, in fairness.

I said stadium. There's a big difference between selling out a 10,000 capacity venue, and the sorts of venues that the Rolling Stones or U2 play, which are often 6 or 7 times that capacity.

Is mise le key

Funky G wrote: »

Plus the crowd have changed - the generation where i think we most have come from have been replaced with the ipod hugging dancing with my mobile phone while texting / facebooking brigade who want to be seen in the light as opposed to dancing in the dark and losing yourself for a few hours as was The Kitchen all those years ago....

.

I love it:D

Is mise le key

Blisterman wrote: »

I said stadium. There's a big difference between selling out a 10,000 capacity venue, and the sorts of venues that the Rolling Stones or U2 play, which are often 6 or 7 times that capacity.

Are we including westlife & Take that? Both sold out croker.

Blisterman

That's proving my point. Neither of those bands were formed in the past 10 years.

Is mise le key

Ah look this is not a very interesting converstaion at all, but that fact that glee can sell out 4 dates in the point which totals a crowd of approx 40,000 overall proves my point.

Funky G

Is mise le key wrote: »

Are we including westlife & Take that? Both sold out croker.

To be fair,

These acts would attract a crowd varying in their years.

When i was a teenager - jaysus - all those years ago, Take That were the boyband to be seen.

In essence you will get the younger and older generation going to croker, be it Take That, U2 etc....

Most acts now are only 20mins old and could just about fill the O2 if not sell it out. so much for this thing called da internet....

But getting back to the main topic of the thread, I would love to see a club do well week in-week out, just for the music and the quality of the DJ playing it

Blisterman

Ok fair enough, but a TV show aimed at preteens is hardly indicitive of the music tastes of Ireland. The point I was trying to make was that Malally's belief that everyone has moved from other genres to listening to pop, doesn't seem to conform to what I've seen, which is a general broadening of peoples music tastes, reflected in the fact that no new artists have reached the level of success that Guns n Roses, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones etc had in the past.

Is mise le key

Ah now come on please, what about,

Kings of leon
The killers

Android 666

This thread is drying my eyes out. Please, won't somebody please think of the children…

Is mise le key

Android 666 wrote: »

This thread is drying my eyes out. Please, won't somebody please think of the children…

The children are fooking idiots:)

electrogrimey

Blisterman wrote: »

no new artists have reached the level of success that Guns n Roses, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones etc had in the past.

What? Beyonce, Jay-Z, Kings of Leon, etc etc. Sales and capacities these days probably far outweigh those of the 60s/70s.

I've no idea what this thread is about anymore.

tigershould

UNASUCKS more like

yes our attention span has got shorter, yes musical genres are blending more than ever, yes pop takes its influences from the 'underground' but just because the 'kids' want to dance to 'Pop' doesnt mean there isnt an underground - every act she named is mainstream but as someone mentioned earlier the sounds in the pop charts today are the sounds of the underground a few years hence. normally fropm producers who producing underground 'hits' before making the big time.

Android 666

Anyone that was involved with this should be castrated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwQZQygg3Lk

And over the next decade or so if I open a paper and see that Will I.Am or Fergie or the other two numpties dies in a car crash or gets something like parkinsons or cancer my reaction will be 'Ha! Serves you right you bastid!'

Blisterman

Funny enough, the Black Eyed Peas used to be a decent alternative hip hop group.

Radiosurfer

Yeah, it is unbelievable that it's the same band that was responsible for Fallin' Up. A tune where they rail against people "selling out" and wearing labels like Hilfinger, almost spawn a Jazz-Hip-Hop scene around them and then they go on to be the satanic ear-rape we know today. Go figure.

Quiggers

Lets be honest, after the last 5 years of bad clubs, bad radio and bad tv talent shows, people dont know there is such thing as choice when it comes to music, even the internet pushes the same 40 artists at you night noon and day, they're in the celeb sections of newspapers, in adverts, used in movies, youtube vevo pummels them at you, 2fm today fm it doesnt matter they're all the same fm. And it's not just dance music that's suffering, even the chart hits are mostly re-makes of old hits, movies are remakes of old hits, even ****ing cars are remakes, modern life has no cultural choice. It's simply, what did they buy before, ok sell it to them again.

demixed

So dance music is dead this month? Was she not saying last month that rock was dead :rolleyes:
Coming next month...country music is dead.

Android 666

demixed wrote: »

So dance music is dead this month? Was she not saying last month that rock was dead :rolleyes:
Coming next month...country music is dead.

No, that can't ever happen... only the dog ever dies in country music...

Quiggers

Stop it man, i get upset when i remember Joe Dolan is dead

Android 666

Quiggers wrote: »

Stop it man, i get upset when i remember Joe Dolan is dead

Joe Dolan was a low down dirty dawg!

super_furry

The Kitchen has been reopened?

BaZmO*

Android 666 wrote: »

Joe Dolan was a low down dirty dawg!

True story apparently

Quiggers

Snoops mentor?

CiaranMT

Slightly OT but I can't pass this article without comment: irishtimes.com

Once iconic in their own right, pored over and much loved by consumers, album covers have become collector’s items – and neither labels nor artists seem to care what’s on the cover, writes UNA MULLALLY

YOU PROBABLY haven’t listened to Smash Song Hits by Rodgers and Hart lately. It’s a record that remains rarely heard, despite being one of the most influential albums of all time – not for the music, but for the world’s first album cover.

Alex Steinweiss was 22 when he fell into a job as art director at Columbia Records, then a new division of the Columbia Broadcasting System. He was meant to focus on advertising materials but in 1940, aged 23, he designed the cover art for Smash Song Hits, thinking music buyers would be more drawn to records if the brown paper bags they had previously been wrapped in were replaced with something a little more eyecatching. Columbia agreed and, when sales of the album jumped 900 per cent, they knew they were on to a winner. So did the rest of the industry and pretty soon every label was copying Steinweiss’ innovation. Eight years later, when Columbia introduced the LP format, Steinweiss designed a prototype for LP cover art and packaging along with “box set” cover art (33 RPM records and shellac). He came up with the simple solution of a cardboard jacket covered with paper upon which you could print a design – more or less what is used today.

But there is now a growing feeling that album covers simply don’t matter any more and, as a result, labels, and artists themselves – especially younger artists who grew up downloading music rather than unfolding album sleeves – aren’t bothering with creating iconic images – once the mainstay of classic albums.

While albums such as Nirvana’s Nevermind, Mezzanine by Massive Attack, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles or The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers automatically evoke images of a swimming baby, a stag beetle, the most famous group photo ever and a denim crotch shot, respectively, hands up who can describe the cover art of recent albums by Adele, Tinie Tempah, Kings Of Leon, Radiohead or whoever else has had a smash over the past 12 months?

The culprit is an obvious one. The supremacy of digital downloads is erasing the importance of album cover art, which has been relegated to an inch-wide image on a screen.

Why would labels arrange two-day long album cover photoshoots and inject tonnes of creative energy into something that is no longer noticed? For a while in the 2000s, major record labels scrambled for ways of making people buy music legally, but instead of focusing on injecting more thought and creativity into packaging and artwork, all they could come up with were short-term gimmicks: Albums on USB sticks, download codes on sunglasses and new phones coming with albums already installed. There was lots of focus on flimsy publicity devices, but little on art, as the idea of creating a brilliant cover was gradually sidelined.

Michael Roe, co-owner of the Richter Collective, Ireland’s top independent record label, believes the importance of cover art is waning, as labels use artwork and packaging as something to pitch to collectors instead of mass production of an iconic image.

Roe is also the drummer with Adebisi Shank, the band behind one of the best Irish album covers in recent times, that of their 2010 album This is the Second Album of a Band Called Adebisi Shank which, says Roe, features “a zebra running across a Tron landscape”.

“It’s definitely important for the artwork to reflect the music,” says Roe. “With that Adebisi record, when we first received the artwork we thought it was the most ridiculous thing we’d ever seen . . . but after a couple of minutes we knew it worked.” From a label point of view, Roe believes two things have become more important than cover art: creative packaging and a good “packshot”, the digital image you get with a download. “Packshots are essential for branding a particular release,” Roe says, “You just have to do something nice digitally. The whole artwork thing is more and more becoming something for collectors . . . I remember as a kid all my favourite albums, you’d see the front and automatically think of all the tunes, but there are a lot of albums now I couldn’t even tell you what the artwork is. It’s less and less important for a lot of people, and a lot of famous albums – stuff like The Black Album – would be slightly redundant with the packshot.”

One of the most anticipated albums of the year, Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, has fallen victim to an attempt to recreate iconography. Gaga is in love with the old school elements of the music industry, still paying special attention to epic music videos (her new one for Judas lasting seven minutes and costing $10 million airs on E! today), but made a colossal mistake in trying to “bring back artwork” with her latest album. The Nick Knight shot cover was initially perceived as a joke by many of her fans thanks to the naff chrome font and the ridiculous image of Lady Gaga as a cross between a 1980s banshee and a motorbike.

In buzzband-land there’s mystery surrounding the upcoming release of one of the most blogged about bands around, Washed Out. The debut album from Ernest Greene (aka Washed Out) features a rather sexy photo of a couple in bed. Cosmopolitan magazine thought it was sexy too, because they printed the image as a stock photo under the headline ‘Is This the Most Satisfying Sex Position?’ So either Washed Out awaits a backlash for not even being pushed to get an original shot for his record, or Cosmo is nicking indie albums to illustrate their pages.

While cover art will always act as an arena within which an artist can create headline-grabbing controversy (as Kanye West tried by spreading a rumour that Wal-Mart banned his cover of a George Condo painting of him on a couch with a naked phoenix), the album cover and packaging are now the preserve of “collectors” – people who buy the physical product, previously known as “consumers”. In the interim, ironic artwork (Best Coast and Klaxons like cats; MGMT, Beastie Boys, The Strokes and MIA go for pixelated imagery and computer graphic-influenced gaudiness) will prevail for the cool kids; nondescript blandness works for Arctic Monkeys, whose Suck it and See is one of the laziest pieces of album artwork in recent memory, with a blank cover and small, plain text; there is Kings Of Leon’s back-of-a-coaster-from-a-derelict-Floridian-stripclub effort for Come Around Sundown ; and soft focus staring-at-the-ground photos seem to be the only game in town for female artists. The cover is dead, long live the packshot.

I'm sure Washed Out is/are worried about a backlash. It's nothing that hasn't been done before.

What about Fleet Foxes, who used a centuries old painting for their self-titled?

How ironic that she references Adebisi Shank, whose EP looks like this:



If she'd broken from her lazy habits she'd have seen that Kanye has about 7 or 8 alternate covers for MBDTF.

I mean, if she's really gonna call out KOL's latest effort, how can she ignore Hotel California?

Art is subjective, Una. If you're going to critique something, at least put in an effort.

EDIT:

The above is a great EP!