The eighteenth in a series of posts where we bring to you the most interesting and stimulating music articles we found this week.

She Might Get Loud by Gary Shteyngart (GQ): Sure, every magazine and their dog seems to have had an interview with or article about MIA recently, but GQ gave their MIA profile to a novelist who hasn’t paid much attention to music in the last 20 years, and the results are striking. Discerning readers will notice the influence of David Foster Wallace’s magazine articles on this piece, and it won’t be a surprise to such readers that Shtyengart’s last novel was an absurdist future dystopia (in summary: this is good writing you’ll enjoy whether you care about MIA or not).

Come Up To The Front Of The Class by Nitsuh Abebe (Pitchfork): Here’s something about indie music: a lot of the musical tropes of indie are meant to indicate an unassuming amateurishness, and not ‘playing the game’. This kind of stuff resonates with some folks, because most people are unassuming amateurs when it comes to music. But when indie bands then hit the big time, and become something other than amateurish and unassuming, there is sometimes an awkward clash between the values of indie music and the values of the mainstream.

Jimi Hendrix: You Never Told Me He Was That Good by Ed Vulliamy (The Guardian): Excellent, detailed profile of the long departed guitar god, which draws upon the memories of friends and lovers. It goes into how he effortlessly seduced the London rock and roll scene, why he set fire to his guitar, and how he both slept with hundreds of women and tried to keep up a tempestuous relationship with the love of his life.

Girl Pop’s Lady Gaga Makeover by Jon Caramanica (New York Times): In the US this year, the Lilith Fair touring festival, organised by Sarah McLachlan, aims to celebrate the music of serious female artists. The festival is struggling financially, and Caramanica argues here that its moment has passed, swamped by the rise of the theatrical, shameless girl pop of Lady Gaga and her many imitators. I’m not so sure about this, and doubt that there’s much of a crossover between fans of Lady Gaga and fans of Sarah McLachlan (and there’s been plenty of great albums this year by serious female artists, from Best Coast to Janelle Monae to Laura Marling).

Simple Minds – “Belfast Child” by Tom Ewing (Popular): On Twitter, Ewing named “Belfast Child” as the worst #1 single of the eighties (and he’s written about almost all of them), and here he explains why – the song is about speaking out against the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but the bombast of the 1980's arena rock style of the song ends up making the Troubles sound grand and mythic. Which does no-one any good at all.

Led Zeppelin’s Bron-Yr-Aur by Bryan Thomas (When You Awake): Led Zeppelin’s III features an acoustic folk tune called “Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp”. Until I read this fascinating article, I had no idea that Bron-Yr-Aur was the name of a remote 18th century Welsh cottage without electricity or running water, where Zeppelin stayed for a month in 1970 in order to write and recuperate.

The Etymology of 10 Music Genre Names by Judy Berman (Flavorwire): Want to know where names like punk rock or hip-hop or funk came from? Berman’s article gives you the answers: surprisingly few of the names, actually, are slang for sex (apart from rock’n’roll).

Arcade Fire by Michael Barclay (Radio Free Canuckistan): Barclay, a close friend of the band and in this instance, given access in order to write a promotional bio, discusses his experiences with the group and with their music over the years - how things have changed and not changed for the band since their breakout success. At the bottom of the piece Barclay links to six prior interviews he's done with all members of the band, dating right back to pre-Funeral, which unearths gems like this from Win Butler in 2004 regarding the bands poor attempts to mix Funeral themselves:

"We’re not good at labelling what track was what. It would have been impossible for a third party to come in, because it was so unprofessional. Like halfway through the tambourine track, Regine’s vocals might come in. We’d try to jam so much into the tracks we had. The mixing/mastering period was so hard. I hate it. You lose a lot of perspective. “Haiti,” which has turned out to be one of my favourite songs on the record, almost didn’t make it on there. We were so depressed with the way it sounded. We were so overloaded from working and thought it was such a piece of crap. Every day we were tormenting ourselves. Regine and I worked on it for five days, doing a completely different mix, stripped it down and got rid of everything. Then Richard [Reed Parry] and Tim [Kingsbury] came back after being away a while and said, ‘No, this is crap.’ So we went back to square one and redid it. It turns out that I like it a lot and I listen to it a lot. It was the same thing with “No Cars Go” from the EP.

"It sucked so bad. I just assumed that it wasn’t usable. When we were in Maine [where the EP was recorded] listening to it, we just thought, ‘Oh god, this sucks.’ After working on it for a while, I went back to it after assuming that it wasn’t going to be on the record, and I thought, ‘Well, it’s not worse than anything else.’ (laughs)."

Highly recomended and extensive reading for any fans of the band.

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Tim Byron