THE TIMES THEY ARE A_CHANGIN.... FOR BETTER OR WORSE?
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I'm aware that this song, a part of my old singles collection, is a song about the fall of Communism, The Berlin Wall, and the end of the cold War. But considering todays events.....
Even if you live under a rock, the news that one of the biggest and greatest pop bands who ever existed are back! back! BACK! can't have escaped your attention. ABBA, who ruled the charts and airwaves from 1976 until their split in the early eighties, have reformed, with their first album of entirely new material since 1981s' The Visitors, and a virtual live experience to follow (basically, they had an arena built in London last year, where a "virtual ABBA" based on motion capture tech and made to look like the band at their 1979 peak will "perform" nightly, rather than put their 70-odd year old selves through the stress of touring.) The excitement and anticipation caused their new ABBA Voyage website to crash just hours after the announcement, such is the love for the quartet and their music. Two of the new songs have been put online, and they are ok: "I Still Believe In You" is a typical ABBA power ballad, a song about themselves and the bond ...
The years 1994 -96 saw the nation in a celebratory mood: British music was back in the ascendant, our film industry was providing Hollywood with some serious competition, and there was a general sense of national pride in our sportsmen and women. "Cool Britannia", as the press dubbed it, saw a positive and hopeful mood that mirrored the swinging sixties. But not everyone went along, or fitted in with this mood. Certainly not Manic Street Preachers. They'd arrived in a whirlwind of eyeliner, leopard print, rage, and political sloganeering back at the beginning of the decade, declaring themselves to be celebrating the "culture of boredom, alienation, and despair", writing cut and paste lyrics attacking consumerism, capitalism, exploitation, as well as themes of the struggles of youth, despair, and other personal subjects. Their manifesto was to sell sixteen million copies of their self-proclaimed "best rock'n'roll album ever" Generation Terrori...
As 2004 dawned, my love of music became not just a passion, but a way to fill the hole in my life left by the unexpected loss of my Mum. There were some dark nights of the soul that year, and i increasingly tried to shut myself off from the world and bury myself in the sounds of whatever i was listening to at the time. Thankfully i had my new group of friends at work to stop me from sinking, and a whole new exciting explosion of bands to pick up my mood. Since the Garage Rock revival of 2002/03, a new crop of bands had emerged to take things in different directions, influenced by similar developments following the explosion of Punk in '76/77. Post-Punk was the catch-all label for bands who took the energy of Punk and the Year Zero attitude in more individual and experimental directions, incorporating all kinds of genres into their varying sounds - Jazz, Reggae, Dub, early Electronica, Metal, Psychedelia, Disco, World Music, Krautrock, even deeply unfashionable Prog - allied ...
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