Official Albums Chart Update on 3/8/2015

I never *liked* her stuff, mainly because I liked actual current black American music more, but it seemed to me (as a resident of Dorset who had been attacked *by both Left and Right* for liking stuff she'd never have touched) that certain people in the main population centres of the UK have a completely unrealistic expectation of the south-west as a place untouched by global mass culture, so she was attacked for doing things which would have been seen as completely normal, unremarkable and not meriting comment had she come from, say, Hertfordshire (and when Alex Turner spoke that way, it was probably reassuring to those people because, while "Devon as non-Americanised island" is politically comforting to them, "South Yorkshire as non-Americanised island" would be actively scary and threatening on a political level). In the rest of the world, where she remained more successful (mainland Europe as well as the USA), she could simply be a part of global mass culture, which she couldn't be in the UK because she had more baggage than she would have had if she'd come from a major population centre; those cultural fantasies are still strong enough to overpower global mass culture even in the minds of people who consume it for 99% of their lives but still expect that the levelling effects of technology haven't happened in a place so similar to their own by global standards that it isn't even funny - if Iran can't be immune, how could Devon? (And the south-east England Mail reader's expectation of certain places' immunity from that culture can even be compared to the Islamist's expectation of other places' immunity.) So I couldn't help feeling sorry for her; there was this weird sense that, while her music was objectively stuff for Mail readers scared of hip-hop or grime, *even that* became too much for them because it reminded them that a staycation is an escape from precisely nothing.

I'm not going to lie. I didn't really get your point he he. Maybe because I'm not from the UK but I love good music. I don't get caught up in where the artist is from or what they do in their spare time or if they have a funny accent (that much I know she got a hard time at the Brit Awards a few years back). All I know is I connect with her music. Plus, I respect artists like her who went out on her own after breaking away from a big record label and does music purely for the passion of it. (And it was a nice surprise to see The Soul Sessions, Vol 2 charting at #6.)