Pearsall's Tunes

Before I get with the program and drop my first proper music post, here's some links to some of my favorite parts of the musical blogosphere (yeah, these'll be in my sidebar as well).

Dissensus - the brainchild of Matthwew "Woebot" Ingram, this isn't a blog, but is the gathering place for many of the best minds and most finely-honed tastebuds in the musical blogosphere (and me). Often provocative, occasionally irritating, frequently illuminating, and never less than essential.

Simon Reynolds - The big dog of modern music criticism. Impossible to ignore his influence among the wider blogerati, and I'll probably shamelessly echo him at times. If you want to write about modern music, you pretty much have to own up to reading Simon Reynolds.

I Love Music - a long-running music discussion forum that brings together many professional journalists with keen amateurs. I don't tend to read it as much as I do Dissensus, but it's generally worth a look.

Freaky Trigger - Excellent pop-culture blog collective.

One of the most popular topics in the blogosphere over the last year or so has been grime, the new sound of urban London, that puts hip-hop, dancehall, and older forms of British stret rave music like hardcore and jungle into a blender set to 'furious'. I probably won't write much about it, as there's already quite a few people doing a much better job than I could hope to do. The blogs to check are Luca Lucarini's Ghetto Postage, the always fantastic Silver Dollar Circle, Chantelle Fiddy's World of Grime, Drumz of the South, Kode 9 and Blackdown. An always excellent non-blog resource is RWD Magazine which has a forum that is excellent for grabbing recordings of radio sets and stuff like that (if you can bear to decipher much of the commentary from the teenage audio).

Other sites I dig include the superb mp3 blogs Autonomic for the People, Bassnation and Gutterbreakz, as well as the hip-hop blogs We Eat So Many Shrimp, Houston So Real, Can't Stop Won't Stop, and Government Names.