Hotpress: The Bastion of Irish Journalistic Standards

Una and TwentyMajor have already covered this, but I think Twenty is right in saying “this needs as wide an audience as possible.”

Hotpress in their infinite “journalistic” wisdom, decided to dedicate four pages of their… fine publication to this guy, a rapper called Nailerz from the ghettos of Limerick. But his music isn’t even on the Bebo page to which HotPress direct you. You have to do a little looking around to find the link to this page.

If his personal page didn’t warn you as to how much of a knobber this guy is, his band page gives more than a few extra hints. “check out mo tunes i robbed most of um cause thats what i do” he says, which is encouraging.

As I’m sure many of you will be surprised, it turns out that the music is awful. The same old “gangsta” shit with piss poor rhymes and the usual gun-glorification. “all mo tunes that are one hundred percent mine ye will have to buy in the shops and they will make you laugh cry freak you out make you kill people and teach you how to get away with murder.” The Irish record buying public are exploding with impatience, I’m sure.

But to be honest, it doesn’t matter that this guy appears to be a pretty talentless thug. It’s the fact that Hotpress dedicated four whole pages to him that pisses so many of us off. But then again, Jason O’Toole, who wrote this piece also writes about a true Irish trail-blazer – the first Irish Page 3 model. It’s obvious that high-brow journalism is O’Toole’s forte.

This is just one more example of HotPress’s rapid decline. Too many pages full of too much crap that bears little relevance to music or the Irish music scene. But it’s just going to continue as long as people keep buying it.

Edit: It occured to me later that maybe Hotpress did the piece because State had done an articles on Scary Eire this issue so Hotpress desperately scrambled around to find something to do with Irish hip hop for fear they seem less than trendy.