Beyonce, Pyramids and Politicans

Last night I passively caught part of Beyonce's Glastonbury performance. If it's your kind of music, I guess I can't criticise it. The odd song had a nice energy and there was one catchy tune in there, although which one, exactly, has long since faded from my mind. They tried to make a performance, more than just a series of songs. Between songs music never stopped playing and the songs faded into one another. It was a landmark occassion, too, with it being the first time that a member of the female gender has headlined the festival.

Pity it was such an unremittingly overproduced borefest, meandering and padded by covers. If you took into account the Destiny's Child songs (and her collaboration with Lady Gaga) as kind of half covers, the amount of Beyonce original songs was likely equalled by the amount of songs not originally by her. Not that I'm opposed to covers, but when it makes up as large a chunk of your set as your own material. Also, it's just not music that benefits from the live treatment, so reliant on studio production. There was a sort of grandeur to the lighting that the music just didn't seem to deserve. This is club music, not festival music. If you like that kinda stuff, all the power to you, just never seemed to do justice to the attempt at spectacle. Then again, I missed a bit of it whilst a friend introduced me to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, so maybe I missed something essential.

But yeah, past few days have been good to me. Not sure if I have mentioned it here before, but a mate and I are co-authoring a Harry Potter fanfic. We decided that the world of magic was too stuffy and boring; HP could do with excitement and romance of politics. So we've got a rough outline, a lot of ideas and are doing a chapter apiece. I just finished chapter 2 these past few days, and will post it somewhere once it has been edited and shizzle. Look out for that.

I wanted to have a review for Gears of the City up by now, but the damn book has disappeared. Could review the first two thirds, but some I doubt that'd be doing the book justice. Ah well. Expect another villain study or something soonish.