As you might now, the 2014 BRIT Awards were held last night, with some of the biggest names of the British (and global) music scene getting together and celebrating each other's work. The attendees and the viewers were treated with several live performances among which there was an interesting collaboration between Disclosure and Kiwi indie sensation Lorde. Now, let's be honest - we've heard the lead single of her pretty good Pure Heroine album far too many times already (catchy as it is) but here the song's remixed into a refreshingly new version. However, by the time the song speeds up and segues into "White Noise" with Aluna of AlunaGeorge coming to claim the stage, there's no question of which alt-popper's performance dominates in this mashup. Nice jobs from the both of them, anyway!
We also heard an Egyptian-themed live rendition of Katy Perry's latest single "Dark Horse", complete with her channelling a neon-clad Cleopatra. She does deliver a solid performance, even though I still can't get over the fact that Prism would've had basically ten better candidates for the next single (which is nearly every other song on the album barring "Roar" and "Unconditionally" which have already been released as singles, in case you missed it). I would very much prefer it without its silly trap elements. What is it with me and my disappointment in single choices these days...?
I'll leave the outfit commentary for fashion blogs, so let's move on to the awards. Deservingly, music icon David Bowie was awarded as the best British solo male, becoming the oldest recipient of a Brit Award at the age of 67. He wasn't present himself so his award was collected by Kate Moss. Fun fact: he's been nominated in the same category for four times before, the first of which resulted in a win in 1984, 30 years ago.
Elsewhere, Daft Punk and Arctic Monkeys were expectedly crowned as the best international and British groups, respectively, while the latter's latest record AM was chosen as the album of the year, beating Bowie's The Next Day among others. In addition to Arctic Monkeys, many BRIT Awards performers such as Ellie Goulding, Bruno Mars and Lorde received awards, while the latter's temporary partners in crime Disclosure were nominated in four categories but eventually lost them all, two of them to Arctic Monkeys. Such injustice - "White Noise" should've been the single of the year. And then there's One Direction who, like Arctic Monkeys, scooped two awards as well. *sigh*
Here's the complete list of winners:
British Male Solo Artist - David Bowie
British Female Solo Artist - Ellie Goulding
British Group - Arctic Monkeys
International Group - Daft Punk
British Breakthrough Act - Bastille
Critics' Choice - Sam Smith
MasterCard British Album of the Year - Arctic Monkeys - AM
British Single of the Year - Rudimental featuring Ella Eyre - "Waiting All Night"
International Male Solo Artist - Bruno Mars
International Female Solo Artist - Lorde
British Producer of the Year - Flood and Alan Moulder
British Video - One Direction - "Best Song Ever"
BRITs Global Success - One Direction
One week ago it was David Bowie's 67th birthday. One year and one week ago he took the whole music world by surprise when, after years of radio silence, he unexpectedly released an unpromoted new single "Where Are We Now?" and also announced a new album, first since his 2003 record Reality. Considering it had been ten years since his last studio album and his last concert had been in 2006, he was believed to have retired. As you might imagine, the world went crazy - the chameleon of pop, the Thin White Duke was back!
It's not easy to make a believable comeback after such a long hiatus, especially with a back catalogue as extensive as Bowie's. People's excitement tends to build up and form impossibly large expectations with such iconic artists, which is perhaps the very reason why the artist executed his comeback unannounced, writing the album in secret. The artist has to prove that he or she is still relevant, making new excitingly fresh music that doesn't recycle the same old pattern but also without alienating previous audiences. What a tough thing to do. Remember when I wrote about Grace Jones's stellar Hurricane? She certainly pulled it off - and after a recording break of 19 years, mind you. But what about Bowie?
The end of the year is drawing near and you know what that means - best of lists! Yay, amirite? (Also, this is my 100th blog post! This calls for celebration.) And no music blogger would be credible without one of their own so... here's mine. It certainly wasn't an easy task to try and narrow down the best songs of a whole year into a set amount, let alone rank them. I was considering all these different kinds of brackets to do the job for me but ultimately ended up with an unbribable scoreboard (THAT TOOK AGES TO FILL). And of course I forgot to save it and then accidentally deleted the whole thing, having to do it all over again...
Phew, it sure took some time. And innumerable replays of songs. The face-offs were tough, but here's the final results. Lists like this are obviously highly subjective since they are merely a matter of personal taste (I didn't give two fucks about chart positions or commercial success). I have also probably missed a myriad of excellent songs - I've spent the whole past year discovering amazing songs from 2012 that I had totally overlooked in my last year's list. Furthermore, in order to prevent the list from becoming too monotonous and consisting of multiple songs from same artists/albums, I chose to use only one song/main artist.
There will also be another post on special mentions, but here's the first part of my final list with the final order - are you ready?
Here we go!
Like, really good. "Reflektor" begins with a groovy intro before developing into a tune of classic Arcade Fire quality. It is also unusually long for a single release, clocking at 7 minutes and 42 seconds but it works surprisingly well and avoids sounding repetitive which you could imagine for a track that long. Here's the accompanying music video, it's wonderfully bizarre as one might expect.
Lo and behold, the rumours were actually true as reported by NME and David Bowie does indeed make an appearance in the song - the Thin White Duke's vocals can be heard starting at 4:54. Which obviously makes the song even more impressive.
"Fun" (and entirely unrelated) fact: the safety reflector, which the song might or might not (and probably doesn't even) refer to, is apparently a Finnish invention. So yay.
Alright, I can do better than that. An actually interesting fact: the music video is directed by the Dutch photographer/music video director Anton Corbijn, who's famously worked with everyone from Depeche Mode and U2 to Nirvana and Siouxsie Sioux. He used to photograph exclusively in black and white which is also the colour scheme for this video. So there you have it.
