Isn't the Guardian a beautiful thing? Proudly-intellectual leftyism aside, the cultural commentary provided in their weekly Saturday supplements the Guide and the Weekend never fails to prove insightful and entertaining. The love-children of these sections includes the fantastic Guardian music website and its regular and on-the-ball Music Weekly podcast.Anyway, the chronological relevance of my unashamed arse-kissing here is that the long-standing main presenter of the podcast, the firm-tasted and (in terms of new music given the 'cool' label) hard-to-convince Paul MacInnes, has just had his last cast. Definitely worth checking out (I'd recommend a trip to the iTunes store to subscribe the the whole podcast), the last podcast summed up Music Weekly's place in 2009 through a series of exclusive live performances from guests they'd had on the show, including performances by Ellie Goulding (in one live track boosting my opinion of her) and Mumford & Sons. Although unrepresentatively acousticy, the mix of artists on this week's cast do mirror the variety yet persistent quirk rife on the podcast generally.
So anyways, I mourn the loss of the bloke, and hope the podcast retains its reliability without him - the man had a rarely free-of-bullshit attitude to music commentary and tastes which were comfortably compatible with mine. It's definitely worth checking out any previous episodes to reel in the last of his musical-taste-juices before his replacement comes in.
Oh, look, I didn't really talk about music at all. Just music journalism. And I gave away one of my sources! Fuck it, if there's one thing wrong with music blogs, it's their pretentious avoidance of mentioning the places where all their recommendations usually stem from. No, we're not all musical hunter-gatherers waiting by the proverbial stream for the first catch, we're just nicking the best crop from others' nets.
