E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

SHE BETTER WIN. HER TASTE IN MUSIC IS BETTER. AND SHE IS NOT A MADMAN. Despite its awfulness in many ways, 2016 has yielded an extraordinary release of popular musical talent, in terms of new tracks; add to this the deaths of Bowie , Prince , and the win of the Nobel by Dylan , and it is a year the music was shaken. Eyewear wishes to advance the claim that, in fact, 2016 is the greatest musical year since 1996, if not 86. Consider the list below, and disagree with the statement IN THIS LIST YOU CAN SELECT 10 OF THE GREATEST MUSICAL ACTS SINCE 1966 FROM POP TO INDIE TO NEW WAVE TO ROCK TO R N B TO DANCE TO TOP 40. Ridiculously, each of these artists has made a fine work this year - either a song, or a collaboration or an album, or in the case of Beyoncé, a masterpiece of film and music, Lemonade . ABC ALICIA KEYS BARY GIBB BECK BEYONCE BOB DYLAN BON IVER BRITNEY SPEARS CHEAP TRICK DAVID BOWIE DRAKE FOY VANCE FRAN

I AM NOT THE ONE YOU NEED Yesterday Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  The award has been met with annual scorn and scepticism by many in the English press for decades, though the list of winners of the past 30 or so years includes Mahfouz, Fo, Brodsky, Lessing, Gordimer, Pamuk, Grass, Coetzee, Walcott, Heaney, Morrison, Munro, Pinter, Naipul, Modiano and Transtromer - all major figures in their genres. It is surely the case that Adonis, Roth, Murakami, Atwood, Ashbery, Muldoon , or Le Carre - to name just a few other world-famous writers now living - have an arguable case to be advanced, as well. Their time may yet come.   It cannot, however, be claimed that the Nobel ALWAYS misses the greats. In its odd career, it has managed to reward Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Milosz, Bellow, Neruda, Beckett, Steinbeck, Singer, Sartre, Camus, Pasternak, Gide, Hesse, Churchill, Mistral, Pirandello, Bergson, Shaw, O'Neill, Tagore, and Kipling . Any prize that,

TRUMP IS PART OF A HISTORY OF WHITE MALE RAGE Like a crazed killer clown, whether we are thrilled, horrified, shocked, or angered (or all of these) by Donald Trump , we cannot claim to be rid of him just yet. He bestrides the world stage like a silverback gorilla (according to one British thug), or a bad analogy, but he is there, a figure, no longer of fun, but grave concern. There has long been a history of misogynistic behaviour in American gangster culture - one thinks of the grapefruit in the face in The Public Enemy , or Sinatra throwing a woman out of his hotel room and later commenting he didn't realise there was a pool below to break her fall, or the polluted womb in Pacino's Scarface ... and of course, some gangsta rap is also sexist.  American culture has a difficult way with handling the combined aspects of male power, and male privilege, that, especially in heteronormative capitalist enclaves, where money/pussy both become grabbable, reified objects and obj