Golden era of pop music has withered and died

LAST week's Mercury Music Prize felt like a marketing exercise just going through the tired motions ..

- Elizabeth Quince, Troon

What passes for pop music today is a sorry shadow of its past. Melody and meaning have been replaced by algorithms and branding.

At best the charts are a golden-oldie blast from the past and new music is conveyor belt of auto-tuned mediocrity. Pop used to have something to say — now it is meaningless.

We need songs that matter again, not playlists built by machines.

Elizabeth Quince, Troon

Not-so-great dictator

WHEN will governments see Trump as they would if he were leader of nonWestern nation, using government to enrich himself, disappearing people off the streets, sending troops into his own cities against his own people and using powers to seek vengeance on political "enemies"?

Trump has not the intelligence to creep up on dictatorship the way Putin did. He's not a freedom fighter gone wrong, like Mugabe for example. His first term with Mexican babies in cages and infants separated from parents some never to be re-joined - is almost a footnote to current horrors.

During his much-vaunted (by himself obviously) Gaza ceasefire deal, a territory the US/UK helped raze to the ground by providing war criminal Netanyahu with the hardware - more Palestinian civilians and a Palestinian journalist were shot by IDF.