Joe Muggs

4 days ago | daily.bandcamp.com | Joe Muggs

LISTS ’90s Rave Music: The Deep Cuts By Joe Muggs · Illustration by Ian Grandjean · April 24, 2025 What is rave music? It’s been many things to many people over the years, as the sounds of American cities got adopted by UK and European party people, then bounced back to the States and then on to the rest of the world. Almost by definition, the sound of rave was hybrid in nature.

6 days ago | theartsdesk.com | Joe Muggs

There’s always been a goofy charm about Billy Idol. As an implausibly chiselled adonis shining out from the deliberate ugliness of the original London punk scene, he was a misfit among misfits. As a pop star through the ‘80s, he was visibly so spectacularly high almost all the time that he somehow made everything pantomime-ish around him. Latterly he’s been such a perfect encapsulation of the Brit rock star in LA archetype he could quite plausibly be starring in a Spinal Tap spinoff.

3 weeks ago | daily.bandcamp.com | Joe Muggs

BEST ELECTRONIC The Best Electronic Music on Bandcamp, March 2025 By Joe Muggs · April 03, 2025 Never let anyone tell you electronic music doesn’t have depth and a vast range of emotion. Just this month, we’ve got bleak and terrifying screeching, elegiac techno balladry for imagined civilizations, exploitation movie dystopias, hopeful dreams of wide skies, and all kinds of other flavors of melancholy, joy, confusion, and foolish fun.

1 month ago | theartsdesk.com | Joe Muggs

I can’t stop reading and re-reading the review copy I got of a new book, out next week. Liam Inscoe-Jones’s Songs in the Key of MP3: the New Icons of the Internet Age is one of those books where you’ll find yourself shocked that it didn’t exist before: it’s a mapping out of the modern musical and subcultural landscape on terms defined by the millennial artists who’ve come to define it.

1 month ago | theartsdesk.com | Joe Muggs

America – the pro-wrestling-ass nation, the ultimate society of the spectacle – famously likes things big, and modern country and western music has gone along with that. Big hats, big trucks, big sentiment, big pop production, very big sales indeed, and not a lot in the way of subtlety.