Music has gotten very girly: Bono
Bono has said that music has “gotten very girly”. Interviewed for Rolling Stone magazine, the U2 singer added, “there are some good things about that, but hip-hop is the only place for young male anger at the moment — and that’s not good”. He went on to explain: “When I was 16, I had a lot of anger in me. You need to find a place for it and for guitars.”
Bemoaning a dearth of rock’n’roll in the charts, he said: “The moment something becomes preserved, it is over. You might as well put it in formaldehyde. In the end, what is rock’n’rollIJ Rage is at the heart of it. Some great rock’n’roll tends to have that, which is why the Who were such a great band. Or Pearl Jam. Eddie has that rage.”
U2’s latest album, Songs of Experience, recently topped the US charts, meaning the band have had a No 1 album in the US in every decade since the 1980s.
Bono cited streaming as a factor in the supposed feminisation of music. “Right now, streaming is on the ad-based model,” he told Rolling Stone. “And that is very, very young, and it’s very, very pop. It’s dominated by frequency of plays, but that is not actually a measure of the weight of an artist ... If you are a teenager and you are listening to whatever the pop act is, you’re probably listening to them 100 times a day. It’s a teenage crush, but in a year’s time you won’t care about that.”
‘Definitive’ documentary on Weinstein
The BBC has commissioned a feature-length documentary about the disgraced Hollywood mogul, Harvey Weinstein. The 90-minute film, which will be aired on BBC Two, promises fresh insights and revelations about the producer, who has been accused of sexual assault, rape, harassment and misconduct by dozens of women.
With a working title of Weinstein, it will include interviews with those who have already gone on the record, as well as people who have previously been unable or unwilling to talk publicly about him and the culture that allowed him to operate with impunity, the broadcaster said.
“This film promises to be the definitive take on the Weinstein scandal,” said Tom McDonald, the head of commissioning, natural history and specialist factual at the BBC. “As well as revealing the inside story of the past few months in minute detail, it will also look to the past to tell the story of abuses of power within Hollywood since its very origins and chart the rise of Harvey Weinstein himself over many decades.
“This is a film which will ask difficult and challenging questions about complicity, the price of silence and the corrosive effects of power.”
It will be directed by the award-winning director Ursula Macfarlane, whose credits include One Deadly Weekend in America and Charlie Hebdo: Three Days That Shook Paris, and produced by lightbox.
Rare fan painting of Bath on display
A hand-painted fan showing a long-lost view of a Bath landmark that Jane Austen would have known has been acquired by the city’s Holburne Museum, where it will go on display for the first time. The rare fan, which had been in a private collection, shows elegantly dressed people strolling in Harrison’s Walk, a tree-lined riverside walk kept exclusive by paid subscription. The building in the background contained Bath’s first assembly rooms, known as Harrison’s Rooms, built for an entrepreneur in 1708 at the urging of Beau Nash, who became the arbiter of good taste and genteel behaviour as Bath became the most fashionable spa in Georgian England. It was painted around 1750 by Thomas loggon, a renowned fan painter with dwarfism who ran a teahouse and china shop under the sign of The little Fanmaker. As well as the fashionable group chatting with Nash, loggon included himself in the scene, the slight figure towards the right. Harrison’s Rooms burned down in 1820, and were replaced by the Bath Royal literary and Scientific Institution, which in turn was demolished in 1933 to make way for a road-widening scheme. Part of the site is now known as Bog Island, site of a public lavatory reincarnated in the 1980s as a nightclub.