Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

use it to throw spooks off the scent

Further proof of the Graun's steep decline:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/sep/13/100-best-albums-of-the-21st-century

the GCHQ/ILM approved top 100 albums!

It'd be worth a Venn diagram if I wasn't so lazy…

eh this just seems like a list of broadsheet newspaper music column music. not sure that I want like midtown 120 blues or something being dragged through this kindof indignity anyway.

^^^^^

lol, it is bad when they mix some token good stuff into the usual run of the mill garbage!

I've not even hate-read Petridis in years and my life feels much better.

they still repping for The Strokes? what the fuck is right with these people?

The least they could've done was name the 45 polled music writers (and add their individual lists). This is as useless as an old shopping list.

no Gaz Coombes = what a joke list

i'd rather see the petridis collection of wanking socks on a washing line than his personal list tbh!

i mean it's a list isn't it they serve functional purpose to their publishers but as somebody said it's one of those where you almost stop liking the good things on it just cos of the tawdry company and conjunctions

also who cares omg. I recently bought a paper edition of the guardian, something I haven't done in years, which reminded me of things I had sortof forgotten about newspaper layouts and helped explain why they are so bad. There is so much space that needs to be filled once advertising and expensive investigative journalism has been factored in. I had forgotten about all the "did you know?" boxes and realised how much of online content is just those elements repurposed only now they have their own page which makes them seem doubly redundant. These lists are literally puff and i don't know why anybody would bother reading somebody going blah blah blah vampire weekend blah blah blah

yeah even our eyerolls are engaging with the game :(

eh it seems fine enough for what it is. I like a lot of those albums. I couldn't really give a shit about those kind of lists though, although it may be a bit incongruous for a poster on website ILM to not be particularly enthused about ranking music in order

nobody should listen to any opinions I have about music anyway, I'm currently listening to a 90's ska punk album and liking it

I'm a pretty damn mainstream listener and probably square in the demographic for this list. If there's nothing on the list that someone like me hasn't heard, it's not serving its purpose.

my taste in music is increasingly atrocious but i don't go around telling people that the stuff i like is the greatest especially when it is just a list of albums that were like "top itunes releases this week" or w/e. I guess this list was just written by the press team at a large music distribution firm.

I did add Midtown 120 Minutes to my download list tho

and that's where it fails. the purpose surely for the distribution firms etc is to point yer average boring guardian readee like me to consume new music and generate more clicks/streams/sales. This list is so safe that it doesn't even serve that commercial purpose.

*reader...

If you think the albums list is bad you should check out the films list

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/13/100-best-films-movies-of-the-21st-century

I suspect your average boring guardian reader barely listens to music from this century. Is there much overlap between trad media readers and new music consumers?

this thread?

‘Much’!

This one's for you, calz:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/sep/13/best-album-21st-century-amy-winehouse-back-to-black

(Facebook opened to everyone over 13 with a valid email address four weeks before Back to Black’s release; Twitter’s tipping point came five months later).

some gr8 sociocultural context there Petridis m8!

yes/no:

the guardian editorial is going to tell us to vote lib dem when the election comes?

yes

Yes, absolutely.

Again.

I think some kind of remainer tactical alliance version of the nose peg thing

it will promote a coalition of the LDs and the Strokes

Kettle was bumming swinson the other day and telling everyone to vote for her, whilst also admitting the libdems brexit stance is idiotic, unworkable and their stance on austerity is unchanged from 2010 - yay go libdems!

Anyone read this today?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/14/alaric-bamping-brexit-party-my-far-left-ex-boyfriend-harriet-sherwood

I suspected it might go one particular way and mention one particular name and was surprised to be dead right

We briefly discussed it in the British politics thread.

did not know that eric hobsbawm's daughter works in PR

Alaric Bamping straight out of the Fighting Baseball roster.

A few days ago The Guardian ran a profile of Constance Wu, from "Crazy Rich Asians":
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/10/constance-wu-interview-hustlers

The article is illustrated with a photo of her in the show - but originally it was a miscaptioned picture of Sonoya Mizuno, her co-star. That must have been an awkward moment in the newspapers editorial offices, given a recent news story about an Australian magazine mixing up a Sudanese-Australian and a Ugandan model:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49471886

The moderators almost immediately closed the discussion and promoted a couple of neutral "she's fab" messages as the featured comments, so that unless you dig into the comments you might not realise what happened.

Shall we poll this one as well?

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/sep/17/the-best-visual-art-of-the-21st-century

Expected The Clock to be number one. The actual number one sounds annoying but you never know.

It happens to be the only one I've seen of the lot and it was in fact quite good!

lol so tacky "top 20 shows that were in london or at a major bienniale"

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/sep/19/american-airlines-aairpass-golden-ticket

Absolute state of this.

We start with a sympathetic subject.

In 1987, amid a lucrative year as a Bear Stearns stockbroker, my father became one of only a few dozen people on earth to purchase an unlimited, lifetime AAirpass. A quarter of a million dollars gave him access to fly first class anywhere in the world on American for the rest of his life.

For several years, the revenues department at American had been monitoring my father and other AAirpass holders to see how much their golden tickets were costing the airline in lost revenue. After 20 years, it seems, they’d decided the pass wasn’t such a good idea. My father was one of several lifetime, unlimited AAirpass holders American claimed had breached their contracts.

Feel like there might be some clues elsewhere about this

Often he’d leave in the morning for a business trip, fly back, and I hadn’t even known he’d left.

I’m not sure how compelling this is as an argument tbh

A few months later, my father sued American for breaking their deal, and more importantly, taking away something integral to who he was.

I just...am not feeling the loss here.

“Steven got on a plane like most people get on a bus,” says my mom, Nancy Rothstein, who was married to my father for 36 years.

I’m not sure this paints quite the picture of him she’d like

Through it all, he continued flying. Everywhere. Airports and airplanes – they were who Dad was.

So normal!

Ernie Thurmond, a former American employee who handled Dad’s AAirpass contracts, helped with adding some special stipulations. My parents decided early on to take separate planes so that in the unlikely event of a crash, at least one of them would be alive for their three children. So the agreement amendment stated: “If spouse is the companion, the spouse will be allowed to travel separately from Holder, provided that the spouse travels on the flight immediately prior to or just after the flight taken by Holder.” My parents wouldn’t fly on the same plane for at least a decade after that.

I cbf pasting anymore, but seriously.

also being celebrated on the quiddities thread.

'This story originally appeared on the digital storytelling platform Narratively.'

yeah this article is total dogshit - there was a bit of chat about it on the quiddities & agonies of the nyt thread earlier today

just incredible that a sob story about this rich asshole who abused the most environmentally-destructive form of travel is appearing on the same day the grauniad is giving blanket coverage to the climate protests

lol i read quite a lot of that thinking wtf is this. a rambling plea for a stratospherically privileged father who, even on the basis of the article, via the special pleading of his journalist daughter, has clearly fraudulently abused the terms of his ticket. what an utter shitshow.