Entries associated with the tag "Blogs":

Bradford Cox from Deerhunter got mugged over the weekend. The dude used to bother me pretty harshly, but I've revised my opinion after reading his blog—which is basically a long, sustained "fuck you" of moderate-to-severe intensity toward anyone who wants to mess with his personal program—and after reading his two-way interview with Dennis Cooper in the most recent issue of ANP Quarterly, aka the best magazine since Don Diva.

So I understand that Bradford getting mugged is a suckness of substantial size. But I think the real tragedy here is that no blog that I've seen covering it has gone for the gold with what I would consider to be the only headline this story could have: "The Deerhunter Becomes the Deerhunted." I've been watching my RSS feed all day, waiting to see those words roll in, but nothing.

But despite not using my main choice for the Deerhunter piece, Drowned in Sound sort of wins the Internet today for running the headline, "Gwen Stefani's Tits Annoy Malaysia." There is some real truth buried somewhere in those five words.

One of the best parts about living in Kalamazoo—you might be surprised, but there are actual nice things about living there—is Western Michigan University's radio station, WIDR. And one of the best things on WIDR is the long-running show SwaG!, an hour of high weirdness hosted by the enigmatic Bat Guano, a man obsessed with archaic kitsch, bizarre sonic oddities, psychedelic weirdness, noise, and surf guitars. The show's blend of the insane and the inane makes an unsettling mixture that, depending on your mood and the quality of the broadcast, can be either the most interesting radio you've ever heard or else completely irritating on a level you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else on the dial—Christian rock radio included. Interested parties can find a small archive of past shows here. I recommend listening with friends.

And speaking of kinda-crazy guys, I've recently discovered the blog written by DJ, cultural commentator, and cocreator of what a lot of people consider the most important remix of all time, Steinski. When I met him after his last Chicago gig he came off less like an old-school hip-hopper and more like those Asperger's-inflected hacker geniuses that do to computers what Steinski does to music, and his blog sort of reflects that. There's only about a month's worth of posts so far, but I've added his blog to my RSS feeds on a hunch that once he starts getting deep into it there's going to be some serious knowledge up there.

If you have the time and/or patience and/or strength of spirit to read yet another year-end list, the results of Idolator's first Jackin' Pop Critics Poll are up now. Chicago's pretty well represented in there. Lupe and Rhymefest both came in about where I'd expected, and Chicago rock nabbed a few spots, with Bound Stems, Lawrence Arms, Low Skies, Eleventh Dream Day, Catfish Haven, and Mannequin Men all making appearances. Best Chicagoland-related surprise: Saint Charles black metal band Nachtmystium beating Jay-Z by one point. 

(1) If you've listened to the Mountain Goats, you've probably had your head knocked by the hugely good words that John Darnielle writes. Seriously, if he wasn't a complete word wizard that band would be like the sad Barenaked Ladies. He's also good at blogging, and right now at his music blog Last Plane to Jakarta he's working on a project called Thirty Poems About My Favorite Black Metal Band, which is exactly what it says it is. The band is Drastus, and they're French.

(2) Nick Sylvester has wrung two hella good posts out of Young Jeezy's new album The Inspiration. So far. Maybe there will be more.

What do these two have to do with each other, or with anything else? Well, I kind of like the kind of obsession they're showing. Like, what if patience was the new hotness, and then everyone cool suddenly started ignoring all the chatter--the blogs and the worrying that all of the dudes at the rock club are going to harshly judge your shirt--and just totally got into listening to records? The Internet has cranked the volume and rate of things that you must hear, judge, file, and get over to such an extreme that obsessive indie dorks now actually have to forget more music in a year than they even heard in a whole year before MySpace happened. I would wager that there are entire extinct subspecies of German techno that no one on earth remembers happening.

So watching these guys work one chunk of music over like that is kinda rad. It's like the music writing equivalent of like the Slow Food movement. It would be interesting to see this turn into a trend. (Possible downside: Pitchfork writers and would-be Pitchfork writers crank out Pynchon-length exegeses and the resulting pile of words that make no sense next to one another crashes the Internet.) 

Of course, while I think those Slow Food types are cool for what they do, I seriously eat at Subway like three times a week. That veggie burger is good, and I really don't know what I'd do if Diplo ever remixed something without me hearing about it.

I've never really liked the Decemberists, though for the longest time I didn't want to admit that I actually hate them. There was always something about Colin Meloy's earnest lit obsessions that made me picture him as the kind of 11-year-old who's as obsessed with The Iliad and The Odyssey as much as he is with The Uncanny X-Men—in other words, someone I could've been best friends with when I was the same age. But baseless fictional nostalgia isn't enough to build a real relationship on, and I finally have to admit that I can't stand the dude.

Maybe it was actually listening to the Decemberists that did it. Maybe it was seeing the smug, "Watch me say words—important words," look on his face during their segment on the Burn to Shine Vol. 3: Portland, OR DVD. Or maybe it was Chris Ott's essay on the Village Voice Web site, which crystallized my formless anti-Decemberists-ism—though more likely it was their fans' frantic, ignorant comments in response to the piece. It may even have been simply hearing too much about Colin Meloy's "tain" that did it. But now, yes, I hate them.

Which is why I thought it was funny when their new single, "O Valencia," came on an alt-rock station during my stay in Portland and I liked it immediately. Then I realized why I like it, which made the whole thing even funnier: "O Valencia" is a straight-up emo pop song. Strip off the song's Neutral Milk Hotel-meets-the-La's arrangement, show the band how to use a distortion pedal, somehow add a bit of expressiveness to Meloy's nasal drone, and you've got yourself something that could work as the second single off a Plain White T's album. The structure, the melody, the whole foundation of the song is indistinguishable from almost any half-assed MySpace emo band. It makes me wonder just how many horn-rimmed pretention-dogs there are out there with big Taking Back Sunday-shaped holes in their lives. (PS: If you think you may be one of these people, please buy the new Brand New record. It might save you somehow.) 

Last weekend Palms Out Sounds, home of the ever-hot Remix Sundays, did something I've never seen a hip-hop blog do: it decided not to post a leaked album. From the post about the decision:

Cambridge of Palms Out Sounds is probably pissed off at me right about now, because I called him at 4 in the morning simply to ask him if he thought it would be ethical of us, as a music blog, to post joints from the new Jay-Z album immediately. After ceremoniously uttering some not so affectionate words, he basically concurred with my current sentiment- that being, these leaks are fucking up my experience as a fan. Straight up. 

At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, I have to cosign on those feelings. The transition to a purely digital music marketplace has its advantages, most of them stemming from the major labels' hegemony being flipped by things like MP3 blogs and P2P networks, and at this point fighting the flow is ignorant at best, and self-martyring at worst. The paradigm shift is happening because it's rad -- because we can trade the shit around and buy it on the cheap, we can load it onto tiny-ass little players and carry it in our pockets, some kid in Norway can put you onto the illest hip-hop mixtape, and yeah, part of the killer-ness of the digital world is being able to stick it to the suits who are trying to hold us down.

But there are going to be some parts of the pre-digital media market that I'll be sad to see fade away. Album art, already hurting from being downsized from twelve inches to five-and-a-quarter inches, becomes mostly meaningless when it's a couple of square inches lurking at the bottom of your iTunes window. The OCD-soothing record-rat fun times of sorting and alphabetizing your collection is now all automated. And yeah, there are no big release dates anymore. There was something about the delayed gratification of counting off the days before a record drops that trying to nab a You Send It file before it gets yanked by the RIAA can't provide. Not to get all Boomer-y nostalgic, but copping a record -- or CD, or tape, or whatever -- on the day it came out and knowing that every other person in the world who's been sitting around for weeks waiting for this thing to drop is in their room or their car, soaking the music in and having their own little Christmas over it, all at the same time as you, was kinda good. It felt like -- Jesus, when did I turn into Lawrence Kasdan? -- like you were sharing in something bigger than you. Which is always what I've felt music should be.

On the other hand, I'm glad I don't have to deal with cocky crate-diggers trying to battle-nerd me over first-pressing limited-edition whatevers, bands you've never heard of can make their living off of music by selling it straight to the people that want it, and I can download "Tonight You Belong to Me" from the sound track to The Jerk when I'm drunk at 3 AM and I totally need it. That's a hard thing to say no to. 

Measuring its 40-minute set time against the sheer number of blog posts and blog posts about blog posts about Lily Allen's first show in New York, the actual concert may actually exist more on the internet than it ever did in real life. I'm still not entirely convinced that she isn't just an animated jpeg like the one on her MySpace background, and given the sort of mild shock some of the bloggers expressed after seeing her -- or claiming they have -- in the flesh, I'm not alone.

A couple of weeks ago I saw a comment on a blog post that mentioned Lily Allen--the commenter said something almost exactly like, "Do people even still listen to that record?" In response to a record that was released just a couple of months ago. In England. With a domestic release that hasn't happened yet. There was something about the way he wrote that, where you could just hear the exasperated sigh he would've spoken it with, and it made me know that that guy was right then and there the best person on the Internet for one fraction of a second. Which is to say pretty much the worst person in real life.