Glastonbury web round-up: Battle royale

Yes, yes, Noel Gallagher was wrong about Jay-Z. There was no reason that Mr. Z shouldn't have headlined the festival (although five years ago might have made more sense) and really, the racially-tinged 'this isn't for your type of music' complaints were best ignored.

But, of course, they weren't, were they? Like an imagined slight in the Big Brother house, the mutterings of discontent have been seized on, and repeated and inflated and turned into a focus rather than treated as an irrelevance.

BBC News watched:

The New York hip-hop star fired up the crowd with an introduction that included a BBC interview in which Oasis star Noel Gallagher said hip-hop was "wrong" for Glastonbury.

Jay-Z then took the stage to the strains of the Oasis hit Wonderwall.

"So they say you guys didn't want me here to be here tonight," he said.

"They said you guys weren't into hip-hop." The crowd responded by chanting his name to show their support.

"Thanks for all the love here tonight," the star added, saying Glastonbury had "embraced my culture".

In effect, though, wasn't all this effectively agreeing with much of what Gallagher said? That hip-hop wasn't core Glastonbury? Wasn't the point more that, actually, there was nothing unusual about having a black American perform on the Pyramid stage? And that Jay-Z's culture and the Pilton culture are just different parts of a musical continuum?

But Jay-Z needed the ghost of Gallagher, as otherwise it was just a standard show, records Gigwise:

Contrary to popular belief Jay-Z was not joined onstage by any of his celebrity friends but did sample an array of artists during the set including AC/DC on '99 Problems' as well as U2, Estelle and Rihanna.

Away from all this, Simon Munnery has written a piece for the BBC Glastonbury site:

In a way Glastonbury is the opposite of the world; outside Glastonbury the rich live in luxury and the poor in squalor - in Glastonbury the rich, the ticket buyers, live in squalor while the workers live in comparative splendour. It's like a cell with many different organs within.

Why doesn't someone give him some money to make TV programmes?

[Part of Glastonbury 2008]