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

THEY LISTEN TO MUSIC Eyewear likes to make lists of pop songs that can be found on Spotify, and share the news with you, our dear readers, every so often. Here is our brief summary of the 12 best songs of the year so far, as we move into the start of summer. I was sad to leave off Drake, Goat Girl, La Luz, Simple Minds, Ezra Furman, St Vincent, Iggy Pop, US Girls, Beach House, etc - all top candidates with great new songs - but this was the winnowed, ultimate list. And as always, this is a personal selection, but I think you will find a fair balance of American and UK tracks, with gender balance maintained, and most contemporary genres included. There is a clear frontrunner, and it is the most significant video/single so far of the year - 1. Childish Gambino - 'This Is America' Impossible to forget the images of the dancing, prancing, weirdly killing figure in the video, which seems to represent the mercurial intemperate low-attention span of American culture - his ...

MUSIC SAVES I turn now to our quarterly report into some of the key popular songs that have made their way as ear-worms into the hearts and minds of the writer of this post, since January 1, 2017 - in short, for the first 25% of the year, what are the top songs so far? Note, only songs that one can find on Spotify count. It has been a good year so far, for pop and indie music... new Shins, and Depeche Mode albums in the same month as the first album from The Jesus and Mary Chain in 19 years can hardly be said to be a bad time.... so, counting down from Number one, in anti-climactic order.... here goes.... the 11 best songs so far, for 2017.... (and be careful, what with the allusions to a decade now as long ago as the 50s was to the Reagan era, this might be the best of 1987 ). 1. 'Love' - Lana Del Rey Arguably her best song - and, like all her songs - a microcosm of her entire canon - like Dylan Thomas' , her work is always imploding inwards to achieve a sort of...

SUBMIT UP UNTIL MIDNIGHT TONIGHT!: http://store.eyewearpublishing.com/pages/the-best-new-british-and-irish-poets As the saying goes: judging poetry is like judging a friendship, or flavours of ice cream, or whether you can make the jump from one low wall to another. Nobody knows how or why you’d want to do it, you have to try very hard to maintain objectivity and you’re likely to end up lying on your back with no friends, covered in ice cream. That said, judgement and being judged is fairly central to any creative endeavor. When I talk to students at open days I try to put their minds at ease about the whole marking process. How can you assign a numerical grade to a work of art? It’s no different, I argue, to the reality of professional (or semi-professional or committed amateur) writing. Whether by an editor, an agent, a producer, a critic, a reader standing in a bookshop deciding what to buy: your work is going to be judged. Deal with it. (It now strikes me that this probab...