Latest news with #alternativeRock
New York Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Shirley Manson, the Unexpected Godmother of Rock
An unanswered question in modern music history is: What happened to the culture that created all those amazing female artists in the 1990s? From Liz Phair to Björk to PJ Harvey to Hole to Bikini Kill to Tori Amos and others, women with wildly different sounds, looks and opinions were as critically and commercially powerful as, if not more than, men. Yet by the early 2000s, we were all living in a Disney pop star dominated world, in terms of mainstream commercial music. Shirley Manson, the Scottish musician who has, for 31 years, been the frontwoman of Garbage, one of the most successful rock bands of the era and a major contributor to this woman-powered '90s culture, has a fascinating theory. 'Sept. 11th stopped all alternative female voices in their tracks, because when people get scared, they get conservative and what does a conservative society loathe? A dangerous woman,' she said. 'The fact is, they stopped playing alternative female voices on the radio,' Ms. Manson added, sitting in her favorite cafe in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles this April. 'I remember someone at Interscope Records telling me KROQ [Los Angeles's alternative rock station] will only play one woman, and it's Gwen Stefani, and therefore we're putting all our marketing money into No Doubt. That literally became the dead end for that incredible explosion of female-empowered alternative voices, which were a direct result of that first incredible wave of alternative women: Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks. My generation was a response to that. Our careers exploded, so we were like, 'Oh, hey, everything's cool, everything has changed, the ceiling has been broken.' And then we hit 2001 and it fell to the earth.' She shook her head, continuing: 'We've now seen two decades of very carefully managed, young, mostly solo, mostly Disney, mostly theater school kids, and they're great! It brings people a lot of joy. To make somebody dance — what a great gift. I could cry just saying that. But as a result, we've also lost the esoteric and the fragile and the dark and the spooky and the fury and all the things that a patriarchal society considers not fitting for a young woman's mind.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Telegraph
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Hamlet Hail to the Thief: A fitfully thrilling mash-up of Shakespeare and Radiohead
There can be few young misfits who haven't identified with the brooding melancholy, loneliness and madness of Hamlet. Likewise, there must be plenty of alienated types who find succour in the music of Radiohead. From their 1992 debut single Creep onwards, they didn't just pioneer alternative rock but seemingly helped to 'mainstream' angst. Yes, they have their detractors, but in the eerie-cryptic vocals of Thom Yorke can lie, at times, an aura of existential insight as potent as any Shakespearean soliloquy. It makes a strange sort of sense, then, to attempt to bring together the best-known tragedy in the canon with the jittery, haunting, disquieting music of one of the UK's most internationally revered bands. This project – a co-production between Manchester's Factory International and the RSC – doesn't raid the back-catalogue in easy pursuit of box-office gold, though; there's no teen Hamlet clamping on headphones to listen to a hit like Just ('You do it to yourself and no one else') – apt though it would be. Instead, Hamlet Hail to the Thief does what it says on the tin, drawing from the more obscure but still chart-topping 2003 album whose title derives from a slogan protesting George W Bush's legitimacy – and whose feverish intensity and disruptive electronica seemed to herald a darkening world. Even then, the approach taken by co-adapters/ directors Christine Jones (who first had the idea) and Steven Hoggett, with Yorke providing key creative steers and new orchestrations, has been painstakingly sparing: the singer didn't want the text to segue patly into song ('needle drops'). However laudable that aim, the result is a hurtling experiment that only intermittently flares into brilliance. At its best, the evening (under two hours, sans interval) combines concentrated doses of the play with a distilled essence of the music that burns hard, and fuses dance-theatre with due reverence for speech. Often, though, the play sounds truncated and the music – performed live, with a band in a row of sealed-off booths – too background-ish and incidental. The opening and closing sections indicate how thrilling the show can, and could, be. Amid a monochrome design scheme, black-suited courtiers erupt in a synchronised palsied frenzy, to a thrashing tranche of the album's opening track 2 + 2 = 5 ('It's the devil's way now…'). If we were in any doubt about the malevolence of Paul Hilton's manically twitchy Claudius, the neat, subsequent use of the slow hand-clap from We Suck Young Blood during his first address underscores his vampiric aspect. Played, with pallid grace and some endearing gaucheness, by Samuel Blenkin and Ami Tredrea, Hamlet and Ophelia are given a touch more time together than usual – 'To be or not to be' is addressed to her, and movingly echoed by her later, and they ardently canoodle on the floor a bit. The repurposing of the ballads Sail to the Moon (with some Shakespearean lines woven in) and Scatterbrain, to bring out their separate, keening sadness, is sublime. More, please, where that came from. As for the incongruous blips of swearing: to bin or not to bin? There's no question about that.
