July 2010
18 posts
6 tags
Cassette meme watch -- LA Times edition →
And first off, hello all, it’s been a while but work got busy and then there was a vacation and etc. etc. However! Back with this because my sense that this would be the year of increasingly higher profile stories would keep appearing has proven true. To quote August Brown:
A tiny but busy tape-based music culture is growing from roots in economic necessity, thrift-store crate-digging...
2 tags
WatchI came upon this video while searching for cute sloth things on the internet. A couple of things:
1) New Jersey seems like a foreign country to me. I know I’m from the South, and we can seem pretty out there, what with our snake-handling churches and our kudzu and our preponderance of country fried steak. But everything I see, read, or hear from NJ (Princeton excepted) seems to be beamed...
1 tag
“Pooping pigeons forced the Kings of Leon to abandon their St. Louis, Missouri,...”
– Those birds have exquisite taste.
—Lucas
“But the greatest difference between the musical past and present is what we...”
– (via Classical Music’s New Golden Age by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal Summer 2010) [long, but worth the read, I think!]
There’s a lot (A LOT) going on in this article that’s interesting, but the section that’s built upon the quote above rings really hollow for me....
Romantic Background Music Can Help You Get More... →
Ok, this study is really about priming with music, as opposed to other outside influences — but maybe I’d get more dates if I hired a cute band to follow me around and play twee love songs? Then again, that might attract the wrong kind of dude. Maybe Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, or the Twilight Singers would be more effective?
xoxo, michaela
Hey Ladies: Being A Woman Musician Today : NPR →
Wow! Well, this feature sure is a mess, isn’t it? Did anyone even think to edit the surveys for clarity and … relevance? Cull out the crazies and the fakes? Cheap and nasty content generation!
Also: can’t help but wonder if the artists submitting surveys “anonymously” didn’t realize that the extensive details they also gave about the projects they’re...
I’ve clearly been hanging out with The Consultants for too long: Just had an idea for a white paper (?!) about the importance of constructive mentorship relationships among music writers at all levels now that the traditional journalism model is bust.
I mean, is it just me, or would stuff like this, this, or this not happen if the newbies had someone to watch their backs (i.e. fact check,...
1 tag
Pop Songs '07-'08 →
I was drawn back to Matthew Perpetua’s epic REM exegesis tonight (perhaps because of the Fables reissue?) kind of out of the blue, and I had forgotten how brilliant it was, particularly the wonderful coda of JMS’s candid answering of every REM lyric question ever. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a critic tackle an artist’s work with such fierce…fairness (and...
OMG, I finally figured out “the song that’s in all the commercials” — it’s been driving me nuts for months! The culprit: Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister.” This was revealed to me while listening to the preview clips for Kidz Bop #18. Really. (Thanks to Eric Harvey for that!)
I suppose if I paid attention to the Billboard Top 100 anymore, I would have...
“As for an overarching Woodsist aesthetic, Donaldson hazards, “It all fits...”
– Out of the Woods: The Freaky Beautiful World of Woodsist < PopMatters
It’s suddenly all come clear! I don’t like any of the bands in this “scene” because of that one key word above: cultivated. I mean, I knew that was always the problem, but now I have quote straight from...
Pitchfork's (Middle-Aged) Girl Problem →
(via tylercoates)
Is this a non-issue? Granted, some of the cited albums are downright bad, if not uneven. Some of them deserved the drubbing. Others didn’t.
I was looking for some way to stab at this list that makes sense, but all I can come up with is this: It seems to me a good chunk of the reviewers involved are young men (ok, and a teaspoonful of young women), and they’re...
1 tag
I kind of can't believe that Christgau gave both... →
Not that they weren’t deserved; it’s just surprising, I guess. Then again, he also liked Nobody’s Daughter.
xoxo, michaela
“It’s very much a punk record in attitude, but one that eschews its artier...”
– Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Wavves: King of the Beach
Yes, nothing says marginalized like performing at the Tonys.
(via barthel)
Zing! 