……………… anyone? Easiest bands / artists to use as strawmen.

Plus, a couple of his songs really aren't that bad. Honest.

Now, Paolo Nutini, THERE's a man I wouldn't mind seeing kicked...he's like a mouthier, less talented Blunt...

Another beloved strawman is Coldplay. I agree more with this one.

xpost!

The most upsetting thing is how they're credited with proving (to a skeptical world) that rock can still be vital/emotional/a force for social change. Them and U2.

Both bands have some great singles though.

And, yeah, hipsters and "indie" fans serve a similar straw-man function for populists and cultists alike. Big surprise.

Embrace are the biggest, lamest, easiest and most undeserving (most of the time) band to use as strawmen.

xpost

Bogshed and Tallulah Gosh have both suffered from strawman syndrome, the former for the so-called "shambling" movement (bullshit, by the way: no way does "Let Them Eat Bogshed" shamble in any way), the latter for the twee indie - possibly warranted if you only look at certain specific songs like "Steaming Train" etc.

Mainstream Country acts are forever used as strawmen to prop up alt-Country. "Unlike Carrie Underwood, Neko Case actually understands the lyrics she's singing." Toby Keith is probably most frequently cited, though I doubt the people doing so have actually heard his albums, which are always better than those of whoever he's being compared with.

Also, The Strokes. This I understand fully.

this whole thing is y know completely genre / audience specific obv. another "classic" is when nme or summat lols at bands they've previously loved ie:
"Now we at Melody Maker have a tedency to get a little overexcited about new bands which sometimes don't quite deliver, Terris anyone?. This time though we have found a band worth of being named the best... etc etc forever..."

have pfm started doin that yet? do rap / dance / pop publications?

The group became a favourite target for mockery from the British music press, especially Melody Maker, where their name was often invoked as the epitome of failure in the music business (despite the group's remarkable longevity).

ha! i totally didn't get those jokes

Wait, why is mindless in quotations marks here?

Terris was NME. i know, because i wrote thew first bits on em... and the gig i saw, in some dreadful indie club that used to be a public toilet in some scary squaddie town, was really exciting, though i don't doubt few will believe me - they had this weird 'bad brains' vibe going on, i swear. but i never imagined them cover material. i did their 'On' piece, and the office was relcutant to give them this much coverage. a few weeks later, they were cover stars, and everyone loved 'em.

a few months later, not so much. the singer was one of the more unpleasant and inexplicably egotistical indie frontmen i've had the misfortune to interview. surly, rude, sullen... the rest of his band seemed embarrassed by him. he wenmt on this long spiel about how rock was 'dead', and there hadn't been anyone who'd meant anything since Dylan. thinking, hmm, this smells like empty blustering bullshit, i asked him what Terris were doing that was so different. he got up from the table and left the pub in disgust at this question, leaving the other three blokes to stare miserably at the middle distance.

a few months later, their album stiffed, and they were dropped. a couple of months later, the first Strokes EP promos got sent out, and everything changed. and i'd still say those first few strokes shows and that EP justified at least some of the hype that followed (the album and subsequent stuffz, less so).

i've used Coldplay et al as strawmen before, but i actually like a couple of Coldplay's tunes, and don't think they're too bad. keane and blunt make me choke, though. kaiser chiefs are probably my strawman of choice - they just seems so desperate for indie-level fame, like they'd eat their grandmothers for blur-esque success. its unseemly, and the music is wretched.

i remembered thinking, tho - 'well, i love this record, but i love richard hell and maybe he sings a bit like richard hell, and maybe this will be just another one of those american indie bands i love who languish in obscurity'. i was editing the music section of sleaze nation too at the time, and remember that commissioning a 4 page feature on the strokes in dec 200/jan 2001 wasn't the 'no brainer' it may have seemed.

to me, 'it all changed' = the audience really caught on to the strokes. there was never an 'official memo' that i know of, i think people were genuinely excited by the whole 'thing'. i write the first reviews of the white stripes in the UK in january 2001 too, and got the first live review/photos at SXSW that year. there was certainly no 'official memo' re: the stripes - no one at the NME knew who they were before SXSW, photographer Gullick and myself had to argue to get pix into the paper. it really *was kind of organic and grass roots, and impromptu and all that, tho i can understand how it might not seem so from the outside.

i think i liked 1 track off the Terris EP ('searching for the switches') and 2 tracks off the LP.

actually, a bunch of peeps from the art dept who went to SXSW 2001 were already into the stripes, should have made that clear.

Me, I guess I kinda cheerlead them a bit, but it's mostly because of the backlash. Press and snark and "It Never Rains in Southern California" lineage aside they're basically Unfrozen Caveman '76 Power-Pop, which is a decent thing to be. I really wanna hear 'em cover "Pretty Please Me".

i remember reading some old thread round the time you left NME and well you seemed rather unhappy with the way it had all turned out. not to dish dirt but was that more business, ie changing of practice re use of material, or about the music covered? do you think if the strokes / stripes had failed to catch on that the nme would be like it is today or was the corporatization (sic) kinda inevitable? also how close was it to real trouble in 2000? (taking into account melody maker and select)

the reasons i left were partly to do with IPC's ludicrous and immoral rights grab, but also because i hated it at NME, and was considered a joke by most of the editors. there was a short period after the white stripes caught on, where i got a little respect for having brought them to the paper, but soon afterwards I was 'taken off' the white stripes story, and the paper's 'big guns' stepped on board (the paper's relationship with the Stripes disintegrated shortly afterwards). the writing was on the wall - it didn't matter what i did there, i wouldn't get any respect.

kerrang! asked me to jump ship, and i much preferred the mag. their word counts were much longer, and they respected their readership, which NME certainly didn't. it was definitely the best decision i ever made. a couple of years later, and one of my editors at NME wrote something in Uncut about how *he was the first UK writer to discover the white stripes, which was a total lie, and i was bitter about what happened for a while. but i got to go to brazil with the stripes for a mojo cover feature last summer, and i still have a good working relationship with them to this day, so it all turned out nice in the end.

if anyone can put to me a convincing case for why radiohead aren't very good (beyond the usual banal 'teenage whiny indie posers' CRAP i sometimes hear: people, it is NO LONGER 1993 and Creep is NO LONGER the benchmark), and why they are worthy strawmen, i shall be astonished.

See also: Dixie Chicks, who are routinely held up as somehow epitomizing everything that's wrong with new country music.

How about "I liked Radiohead way more when they were a thoroughly-conventional-yet-totally-enjoyable Britrock band"? 'Cause that's how I honestly, truly feel about them. Kid A just. plain. didn't. grab. me. And I really tried to like it - I knew LOADS of people (whose musical tastes weren't too far off from my own) who flipped out for that album, and their subsequent albums.

And I'm neither teenage, whiny, nor indie.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/images/400/kennyeverett_3.jpg