No Rock And Roll Fun

TO BE PERFECTLY FRANK...: I'm not sure, had I been in charge of the Blogcritics Frank Black interview I would have chosen to lead off with the apparently burning question "You have used changes in time signature throughout your songwriting career, often in the form of foreshortening at the end of a phrase. The effect for me is to propel the song forward - what is your intended effect or affect", especially when there are some juicy nuggets further in - rumours of an ubergroup, for example. But on the whole, the interview could almost have been spun by Craig Brown for the Private Eye diary slot, as blogcrit after blogcrit walks up, starts a five-thousand word question with a Sovietesque piece of 'all praise to the Pixies', paints in some background (a lot of background) and then asks a closed question, getting a bemused but polite brief response from Mr. Black. It's not an entirely pointless exercise, but it does point up the problem that I have with much of the material on Blogcritics - that it takes everything a little bit too seriously, and that it could benefit from a spot more editing. it might go against the spirit of blogging (whatever that is) but, particularly on multi-writer events like this, maybe someone should be brave enough to wield a bit of blue-pencil here and there?