It's silly, but we can't help it: a new year is always full of promises, as if we could go from an overcrowded, unequal, and violent world to one of beauty, sharing, and respect by the mere magic of a night spent dancing to Marcia Baïla while drinking more or less corrosive champagne. By all accounts, 2015 really put us through the wringer, and we tell ourselves that it can't be worse in 2016, so it's time to wish you some really cozy things.
1. An excellent album every month, with a bunch of stars in iTunes and melodies that make you sad or happy but certainly not indifferent, the kind you listen to on repeat until you know every transition by heart, that makes you like the artist's Facebook page, track their concert dates, and even talk about them to your hard-of-hearing neighbor.
2. Generous concerts, not too expensive, with good sound and not just in Paris. Friends, promoters, there are good venues (with 2 "l"s) all over France, so stop with the white zones!
3. Friendly record store clerks, because if it's for sale in your store, there's no need to look at us like we're the biggest idiots when we ask for it.
4. Festivals with original and consistent programming to put an end to the identical and nonsensical lineups from Vieilles Charrues to Eurockéennes, including Musilac or Main Square. Fortunately there's Rock en Seine!
5. Choice on the shelves of Fnac, because we're happy to support the agitator's moribund music section, but 9 times out of 10 we end up on Amazon. And while we're at it, proper vinyl furniture, because we're past the age of digging on all fours through bins where extracting a record ends up looking like a game of pick-up sticks.
6. Band t-shirts made by real talented graphic designers and not by the business school intern, who systematically expresses his immense creativity by slapping the album cover on chainsaw-cut white t-shirts. Record labels must really be full of lazy executives not to have sniffed out this business potential yet.
7. Download vouchers that work with vinyl records. We know, listening to a 33T in your Laguna isn't the most practical thing, and providing MP3s is (for once) an excellent response from record labels. Except when it crashes and you find yourself explaining your problem to the intern at PIAS or Fauve Corp., already very busy positioning the album cover on a white, chainsaw-cut t-shirt...
8. Passionate discussions between amateurs, professionals, singer-songwriters, wankers, DJs, CD pushers, techies, roadies, press officers, journalists, front-row fans, back-row fans, festival-goers, organizers, city dwellers, country folks, drummers, bassists, oud players, zither players, ocarina players, vinyl record ayatollahs, streaming fanatics, remixers, sound engineers, ...
9. No Fauve album.
10. A new Smiths album. Or an Elliott Smith album.
Alright, happy musical 2016!
