rockcritics daily (phase 1)

TEE-VEE CRITICS

Rickey's post below brings to mind something I've been meaning to ask for a while now: can anyone recommend me some good TV critics? Ken Tucker at EW, of course, but who else? I ask, in part, because I've been enjoying a couple older books I recently pulled off my shelf by Michael J. Arlen, who for many years (during the '70s and '80s) wrote about television for the New Yorker. TV itself is a more interesting beast now than it was then, I think, so which critics are covering it well?

POSTED BY SCOTT WOODS

FROM THE DESK OF RICKEY WRIGHT

The always fascinating Nikki Finke brings to light many details about the L.A. Times' long searches for a new Hollywood columnist and TV critic.

J.D. CONSIDINE WRITES...

Nice as it was to read the Folio piece about Musician magazine, two things struck me. One was the omission of Robert Fripp among the musicians who wrote for the magazine, since Fripp was a regular contributor who even wrote a cover story (an interview with Joe Strummer, if I recall).

Two, I thought it was a bit mean-spirited for Bill Flanagan to describe the early staff--presumably, those who were there before he became editor--as quirky and genius nuts. "They'd never get a job at Rolling Stone. They might get a job, but they wouldn't keep it!" he's quoted as saying. Well, David Fricke, who was an editor at Musician pre-Flanagan, seems to be doing pretty well at keeping a job at Rolling Stone.

FROM THE DESK OF PHIL FREEMAN

An old article on The 10 Worst Concept Albums. Styx made the list twice; does that display laziness/lack of imagination on the writer's part, or were Styx that much worse than everything that surrounded them? And hey, I like Tales From Topographic Oceans, bud! Anyway, this leads me to noticing that the guy's #1 pick has, since the article's publication, been issued on CD.

FROM THE DESK OF STEVEN WARD

THE GREATEST MUSIC MAGAZINE OF ALL TIME:

Writer Ken Gordon takes a look back at Musician in Folio Magazine.

FROM THE DESK OF PHIL FREEMAN

Scientists still researching earworms. Has anyone ever done a study to see whether the commonly-cited anti-earworm tactic "imagine the song in question being sung by Bob Dylan" really works? I find that when I've got, say, "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" stuck in my head, the best cure is an hour or so of Merzbow or Borbetomagus. Or watching the Fox News Channel.

SCOTT WOODS RANDOMLY INTERJECTS

Last night I was driving downtown to pick up my wife, and for four or five blocks I followed a guy with this license plate:

                    ABBA-666

I tried to get a closer look at the person behind the wheel, and there was nothing unusual about him as far as I could tell. Also, the car itself was totally 'normal'--an American model of recent vintage, something my parents wouldn't be at all uncomfortable driving (point being: this wasn't some souped-up metal-mobile or something).

Two questions came to mind:

1) Is it possible that this plate was just divvied out by the Ministry of Transportation to this individual as part of a sequence (next in line after ABBA-665)?
2) I believe it costs $100 for a personalized plate like that. So what would possibly have possessed someone to do this? Do they have serious issues with Agnetha, Bjorn, et al.? Do they think there's something hilarious about it? Do they belong to a cult?

[I'm fully aware I should be careful about publishing people's license plates on a web site, but I think a special case can be made when it involves ABBA and Satan, no?]

FROM THE DESK OF STEVEN WARD

The Blame Game

Geoff Barton, a writer in the 70s for the British weekly Sounds and the first editor of the metal weekly Kerrang!, is back writing columns, CD reviews and the occassional feature story for the British monthly Classic Rock.
Each month, Barton pens a column he calls "Almost Famous" about his recollections of the rock world from the 70s and 80s.
In the November 2003 issue of the magazine, the first sentence of his column starts off, "So Geoff, why did you return to this rock writing malarkey after all these years?"

Barton explains *why* at great length but about five paragrapghs in, Barton writes, "Then suddenly a weird chain of events began to unfold. I won't bore you with the detials, but they involved the Friends Reunited website, the Wildhearts, ex-working colleagues Cathy newson and Malcolm Dome, and a guy called Steven Ward, who works in the US for a website called www.rockcritics.com.
"I had a lengthy chat with Steven, and he kindly posted the results on the web. And it got me thinking.....maybe I can do this rock and roll thing again."

So there.

Love him or hate him, I'm partially to blame. God bless you Geoff Barton and thanks for the shout out in your column.

FROM THE DESK OF PHIL FREEMAN

Sting's publishing an autobiography. Good for him.

There are only a half-dozen musicians' autobiographies worth reading. They are:

Miles Davis' Miles: The Autobiography
Lemmy's White Line Fever
Charles Mingus' Beneath The Underdog
Johnny Cash's Cash
David Lee Roth's Crazy From The Heat
Motley Crue's The Dirt

Can Sting top David Lee Roth's storytelling skills, and sense of humor? I really, really doubt it. But I'm sure someone will buy this thing. So consider this post a consumer alert, for your holiday shopping convenience.

FROM THE DESK OF BOB B. BRADY

Testing, testing, 1 2 3.

Scott said I could post my Top 10 albums here if I wanted to so here goes.

1. The Strokes: Room on Fire
2. The Strokes: Room on Fire
3. The Strokes: Room on Fire
4. The Strokes: Room on Fire
5. The Strokes: Room on Fire
6. The Strokes: Room on Fire
7. The Strokes: Room on Fire
8. The Strokes: Room on Fire
9. The Strokes: Room on Fire
10. The Strokes: Room on Fire

Oh and I loved this review of The Strokes Room on Fire by Keith Harris in the Voice.

FROM THE DESK OF [YOUR NAME HERE]

blah blah blah blah blah multiplied by an infinite # of blah blah blahs.

An Offer You Can Refuse

The next two months are going to be really really busy ones for me at work; it's already starting to pick up. And of course, there'll be all the holiday madness on top of that--Christmas parties to DJ, family to visit, etc. Combine all this with my already seriously wavering desire to keep on top of all things music critic-related, and what do you got? A potential blog crisis.

There are three options to save the situation, far as I can see:

1) I can put this thing to rest permanently by deleting it.
2) I can just stop updating it, or update it even less frequently than I sometimes do (I was serious about making this a "daily" when it started).
3) I can hand over the User ID and Password for this site to anyone out there (the more, the merrier) who would like to post stuff here--turn this into more of a rock critics "collective," so to speak.

#3 is by far the most attractive option as far as I'm concerned (followed closely by #1). I'd much rather be a contributor to a blog like this than to keep it all to myself.

I think the original impetus behind rockcritics daily was good. I wanted it to be a resource center and a clearing house for rock critic-related stuff going on out there: to point stuff out, to expose people's ideas to different readers, to enlarge or engage or brawl with those ideas. I still think it can be those things--maybe--but I know for certain that so long as this site is mine and mine alone, it won't get there.

So please e-mail me if you think you might be interested in this--or post a comment below if you have any other ideas. I will be pleased to give ANYone who's interested enough (so long as you seem sincere in wanting to contribute) the necessary info to post on this site. You can post stuff under a pseudonym if you want--though you will be required to "sign" your posts (it'll be built into the template). And I won't edit your posts, though I may clean things up with the formatting if it's called for.

I want to see more content posted more regularly and by different people with a different slant on things. That's all.

Annie Gets Gunned--Again

Honest admission: I had no idea when I posted my Leibovitz comments below that she had also been given a thrashing in yesterday's New York Times (a good piece by Ginia Bellafante). Ugh. (Not 'ugh' in that A.L. doesn't deserve it, but 'ugh' in that I would've kept my mouth shut if I knew everyone else was already jumping on her!)

[Thanks to Phil Freeman for pointing this out.]

Blogging the Charts: More, More, More!

Thomas Inskeep has joined the fray with Rock Me Tonight, "wherein [he] attempt[s] to review each and every single which hit #1 on Billboard's Hot Black Singles chart during the 1980s." Read these reviews aloud through a vocoder for maximum effect.

Blog Action

Some updates of note on the blog links page.

A Review

Of Richie Unterberger's Eight Miles High. By Steven Rosen in the Denver Post.

An Excerpt

From Milk It! Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the '90s, Jim DeRogatis's new book. Published in the Chicago Sun-Times.

[courtesy of musicjournalist.com]

Vanity Fair's Music Issue

Vanity Fair could learn lesson at 'School of Rock.'
By Lloyd Sachs in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Sample: "But seriously, folks. Rock icon that she is herself, Leibovitz may want to celebrate the vitality, the diversity and--excuse the word--maturity of popular AMERICAN MUSIC. But with all due respect to the great artists included in the photo, the more you gaze at it in all its complacency, the more you may feel like you're looking at a brochure for a wax museum."

Bravo. For the third or fourth year in a row, I've purchased Vanity Fair's "Music Issue," at least in part because the damn thing always feels and looks so dauntingly impressive. It's like a coffee table book on pop music for a quarter of the price. Usually I find at least a couple pieces of interest, and I figure it's a keepsake that will be fun to look at in 20 years (mind you, I've been saying this about all the magazines I've had stored in boxes now for 20 years or so, but do I ever pull them out and look at them?).

This year, however, I cursed myself for making such a rash decision at the newsstand. (There's also the not minor detail that every $7 purchase at the moment has to matter.) The truth is, I already can't remember a damn thing in the issue, except David Bowie's Top 25 CD wish list, which was actually fairly interesting (though I hope this doesn't give the folks at Da Capo any funny ideas...). Oh yeah, and Annie Leibovitz.

Now, I don't know much about photography, but something about Leibovitz's work really rubs me the wrong way. Admittedly, my friend Chris Buck influenced me in this regard when I interviewed him a few years back, though at the time I didn't give his specific criticisms a lot of thought. (Chris: "There's no mystery, there's nothing that captivates me in her photographs. They're descriptive in a literal way, and they're literal even in a way that has no twist or interest to me.") I now have a much better idea of what Chris was talking about.

Take her Vanity Fair panorama gatefold cover photos. There's something in the way Leibovitz presents her images of pop musicians--always an eclectic bunch, always looking like a Benetton advertisement for the more visible figures of the music industry--that is highly unnerving. Maybe it's that most of the subjects appear so pleased with themselves for being among such esteemed company (could James Taylor, Mary J. Blige, and Lucinda Williams possibly look any more sanctimonious in that photo?). Or maybe it's the complete flawlessness of it all. Leibovitz seems to demand of her subjects that they give the audience precisely what they expect: so we get on this year's cover gallery a stoic Willie Nelson, a euphoric Queen Latifah (yes, the popular rapper Queen Latifah), former wild man Anthony Kiedis looking humbled but with a slight hint of "madness" remaining in his glare. (To be fair, a couple subjects manage to transcend the conformist demands of her lens: Dr. Dre, for instance, is as implacable as ever.)

There's not a hint of fun in any of this. It merely confirms my belief that the people who make pop music are far less interesting and mysterious than the music they sometimes make (or in this case, made--or God forbid, will one day make). Even if that is true--and I'm not sure that it is, and Chris himself would certainly disagree--I prefer photography that can at least trick me into thinking I'm completely wrong about this.

Thus Quoth:

H.L. Mencken
"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."

Marshall McLuhan
"The future of the book is the blurb."

"There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening."

Oscar Wilde
"A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies."

"Ambition is the last refuge of the failure."

Mae West
"I always say, keep a diary, and some day it'll keep you."

Blog Alert

Prog Revisted, side 2...

The blissblog prognosis continues at:

Closely related: some good stuff in the Five Poppiest Art Rock Songs lists in rockcritics.

Prog-Cinema mini-gallery:

Rollerball: Hyped heavily on its "ultra-violence." I loved the iconography at the time, though never actually saw the thing. The soundtrack, however, had major clout for one brief summer among the younger-brothers set, esp. the opening Bach pipe organ thing, which cannot be properly contained in a word as puny (in this case) as "bombastic."



[insert any Pauline Kael sentence ever written about Ken Russell here...]




[the hero "steals an albino hermaphrodite demi-god who is reputed to be able to tell the future..." AMG]







[One of my first concerts ever was seeing them on this tour with--egads!--City Boy. The movies were pretty neat anyway.]

Before They Were Almost Famous: Case Study #1



Check out the guy on the far right...it...it couldn't be, could it?!

Proglodytes

Blissblog's Progstravaganza is well worth a look. I've barely even made it through the sub-genre headings yet--lots of writing to go along with it, too--but the lists alone are a lot of fun. (My favourite sub-genre listing: "Parsons Prog.")

To "Prog Soul" I'd add Marvin Gaye, in the very least for What's Going On, and probably some of those mid-to-late '70s releases I've still never made it all the way through (one's even a "concept" about his ex-wife or something). I'd also at least consider Riot, and Roy Ayers too (also part of "Ayers Prog," along with Kevin).

And a couple suggestions for more micro-inspections:

When the Levee Broke

Swan Song: What might School of Rock tell us about the state of rock 'n' roll?
By Alex Abramovich in Slate.

This piece is like five years or three weeks old or something, but anyway, I've been thinking a bit about this paragraph:

"Consider the sequences in which [Jack] Black's kids rock out to Led Zeppelin's 'Immigrant Song' and the Ramones' 'My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg).' Setting Zeppelin's Wagnerian pretensions against a punk song about Ronald Reagan's trip to a certain German cemetery might, in fact, be the point, but the Ramones themselves would have objected--for them, Jimmy Page's taste wasn't much of an improvement over Reagan's. ('We decided to start our own group because we were bored with everything we heard,' Joey Ramone explained once. 'Everything was tenth-generation Led Zeppelin...overproduced, or just junk. We missed music like it used to be.') Here, and elsewhere, School of Rock's implication isn't so much that such musical turf battles have sorted themselves out with time--it's that they've simply ceased to matter."

I have a few minor objections to this (chief among them being that "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg" is surely the one Ramones track that could rightly be labelled "Wagnerian"), but mainly, I just don't understand what the complaint is here. In my high school (Catholic Central, London, Ontario, '78-'83), the chronology of rock wars went something like this:

At this point, I was attending some of the infamous Friday night "field parties"--35-40 kids, guys and girls, driving out to a deserted camp site outside of the city, getting really drunk and high, trying to feel up whoever would let us feel them up--and the soundtrack at the first couple I went to was 100% Hard Rock. Back in Black and Physical Graffiti in particular. Strange I don't know those records better than I do; I think I just tuned it all out. It was still, in my mind, Like Punk Never Happened; I mean as far as they were concerned.

I think it was at a house party in grade 13 when I was shocked to discover that over the summer all the rockers had finally jumped on board. London Calling was vital in this conversion process, but the album that got played over and over at this particular party was Gang of Four's Entertainment! I owned the album, and probably in my own fumbling-idiot way tried to grasp its leftist ideas (though "contradiction" wouldn't become a fave buzz word until university), but at that party, it had simply replaced Back in Black as THE headbanger LP of choice. All the rockers were still going "Woooohh!" but now they were doing it to "This heaven gives me me-graine!" instead of "Knockin' me out with those American thighs!" It was an amazing revelation. I guess I was mature enough by then that I didn't act over-protective. Instead, I got pissed and joined along in the chorus. Or maybe I was just pleased to have acquired a bit of "status" because of all this; you know, being an original punk and all...(Sadly, I kept my r&b to myself, and didn't wisen up to hard rock for at least another couple years.)



I probably haven't proven much with this story. By the mid-'80s, the divide that existed between the Ramones and Led Zeppelin had been completely obliterated as far as I could tell, though of course, being out of high school, maybe this is a little too easy for me to say. Let It Be (the good one) was a strong early indication of this; by the time Licensed to Ill came out, it was all over. Anyone still hanging on tightly to their small piece of hard rock vs. punk (vs. disco vs. rap vs. pop) turf by '88 or so started to seem faintly ridiculous. I felt no reason to mourn the breakdown of this divide then, and I feel no reason to mourn it now.

p.s. I really enjoyed School of Rock, and "Bonzo" is music-movie moment of the year, easy.

link posted by RCD 10:26 PM

I'm A-Kill You!

Dust It!

Free Admission: Coming to Terms with Writing about Music. By Ben Tausig in Dusted.

From the sidebar: "Ben Tausig takes a look at the role of music criticism and its potential (and ceiling) as a tool and a companion. The options for discovering different kinds of music journalism and criticism today are abundant, even saturated, but how much of it is a good read? And what makes it so?"

He's Your Boogie Man, That's What He Am...

In Boogie Fever, Michaelangelo Matos has embarked on a project to review and grade every Billboard Number One R&B hit, from 1942 to the present. The latest in a fine series of chart blogs (see Popular and American Hot Wax if you haven't already), all I can think of to say right now is Wow!

New Blog Alert

In Punk Rock Blues, Tim Byrnes is "looking to share [his] thoughts on rock and roll as social architecture and how it fits in one's life etc etc etc." He starts things off with a lengthy post about Mott the Hoople and Roxy Music. Take a look.

Re-Make/Re-Model

Mark Boudreau has revitalized his blog The Rock and Roll Report in a major, major way. Always "looking for loud," The Rock and Roll Report covers not just music, but TV, movies, current events, "music biz" info, etc. A must-add to your links list.

E-mail Query

Received a few days ago (posted here anonymously):

"I was just wondering if you happened to know anything about Neva Chonin, the San Francisco Chronicle's pop music critic. Her byline disappeared a couple of weeks ago and former freelancer Aidin Varizi is now credited as 'San Francisco Chronicle Pop Music Critic.' I like Aidin's stuff a lot, but I'm just curious, and couldn't think of whom else to ask, so I decided to ask you..."

[Anyone know? Please use the comment box.]

A Public Service Announcement

From Jason Gross:

The Girl Group Mailing List was created as a forum to talk about the challenges of writing, editing and general career advancement as a woman working in the arts media. It hopes to offer thoughtful advice and support for the furthering of women who already are or would like to become professional music writers, and to as serve as a space to critique current writing and music trends.

It's a Peckinpah-looza...

In the mightily impressive-looking issue of The High Hat, featuring a dozen different pieces on the director and his work. (Sorry, I think I've used that dumb "looza" headline three times now...couldn't resist, though.)

Also in the same 'zine and worth checking out: Phil Freeman delves ever further into defining the Aesthetics of Heavy, which looks, in the very least, like an interesting primer for non-heavies like myself who wouldn't mind a little more heavy now and again (heavy makes you happy, right?).

(So what's the difference--musically speaking--between 'heavy' and 'hard'? How is 'hard rock' different than 'heavy metal'? Or are they? I think they are, but I need words to explain why...)

2 Questions...

Asked by Andrew Beckerman in Report From the Underground: Music Criticism (from Fake Jazz):

"When I first started writing this series of columns on music criticism, the original intent was, or rather the original questions I wanted answered were: Why are reviews the end all and be all of music discussion in the public sphere and in academic circles, why was there no such thing as music criticism?"

[Link courtesy of Flaskaland]

New Blog Alert

Every DJ worth their salt needs a cool alias. And DJ Matrimony is no exception. Well, okay, maybe the 'cool' part ain't exactly true, but hey, at least he's trying!

Jook-Box Jury

Andy Fuertsch, guitarist for the Delinquents (as in Lester Bangs and the...), has uploaded tracks from the 1981 release, Jook Savages on the Brazo. Listen to the album here. And feel free to comment, since you're all supposed to be rock critics.

[You can also listen to Andy talk about the Delinquents--and working with Lester Bangs--here.]

The Curse of the Shrinking Inbox

I recently installed some kind of spam filter system on my computer. Which means that my daily inbox has shrunk from the usual 800-1000 e-mails per day to around 50-60. Obviously, it's working. Which is both great and unnerving (especially as there seems to be no way for me to see what I've missed--I suppose that would defeat the purpose). This is partly my way of saying that no one, that I'm aware of, has been sending me anything to post here (except Steven, below), so that's why it's been so quiet (also, it's Thanksgiving in Canada). If you sent something, and were somehow interpreted as "spam," please try again.

If you live in Canada, enjoy the day off. You deserve it. (I have no idea what that means.)

From the Desk of Steven Ward

I recently slagged an Ozark Mountain Daredevils reissue in PopMatters. When I invited readers to tell me why or how I was wrong, I didn't really expect a response. I received the following from 'Blue Meanie':

"So tell me...what is it with you guys? Is slamming someone's creative output the high point of your life? I have no idea what this album sounds like but I do have rather fond memories for the 'one-hit' 'Jackie Blue.' It makes me feel pretty good to listen to it. Now before you go out [on] a limb and condemn my musicality, check this out. I've been studying Music since I was four years old, I've played, produced and recorded with some of the most legendary bands of the last few decades, and I make my living in this industry. It might even be fair to say that I have more time behind a set of studio monitors than you have in front of your home speakers. Granted taste is and will always be subjective...but enough already. You're not helping anybody out by steering them away from a 'bad, soulless' recording, you're just spitting out negative verbiage. If you don't like it, just say it's not your thing...don't inadvertently condemn the rest of us for our musical tastes.
"Oh and by the way, in regards to your comment, 'if you think the slick production values of the Doobie Brothers and that kind of fake soulless soul was soulful'...The Doobies have more musicality then you'll ever squeeze out of your favorite sixstringers, trust on that."
--Someone who's Sick of This "So Called Editorial Bullshit"

[I still like my friend Tim Powis's description of Ozark Mountain Daredevils as "the real OMD."]

Back That Axe Up!

Pop's Living Dead.
By Dennis Romero in LA CityBeat.

Sample: "My father, a rock-musician-turned-journalist who ironically once said disco DJs hurt his gigging prospects and forced him to make a career change, also told me to stop dusting off his old Beatles records and find my own damn music. That I did, but, two decades later, his music still seems to dominate the popular discussion."

[Also visit Dennis Romero's danceblogga.]

Before the Blues

An essential new book explores 'hot music.'
Robert Christgau reviews David Wondrich's Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot 1843-1924 in Seattle Weekly.

More on David Wondrich here and here.

A Stomp and Swerve audio companion here.

Quote

"In
one
corner,
Nick Rhodes
of Duran Duran
and Paul Rutherford
of Frankie are having
a nice little chat about Art.
In another, Frankie's Holly John-
son is engaged in heated debate
with the Village People. Close by where
Duran's John Taylor is propped precariously
against the bar, Spandau's Gary Kemp--clad, like
everyone else, in an outfit that probably cost
enough to feed a family of four for six
months--is bending the ear of
Smash Hits editor Mark
Ellen about the miners
strike, being working
class and all that.
Nearby, his
brother
Martin,
biting
back
his
envy
of Paul
Rutherford's
Yamamoto cloak, is
pulling pearls from his
necklace and throwing them at
people. Nick Rhodes grabs someone's
camera and flits about, snapping everyone.
'Don't bother with that, Nick,' taunts Spandau drum-
mer John Keeble. 'They're bound to be crap, just like your
book!'"

--Dave Rimmer, Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop, 1985, p. 180 (p.80)

I had no idea

Dave Rimmer had a pop book out that wasn't Like Punk Never Happened.

Attack of the Killer Movie Bloggers

I called out for movie blogs a couple weeks ago--here are some of the findings, sans commentary as I've mostly just had a cursory glance at this point (most--not all--of these are in the 'strictly cinematic' category):

Naked Girls Inside, for Real!

Rock Confidential is all about sex, girls, and rock 'n' roll, and/or "the ultimate combination of rock 'n' roll and adult entertainment." There's a small but growing CD reviews section, and a small but--oh never mind--sex column. I'm frankly surprised something like this hasn't been attempted before (I guess Blender was a tentative step in this direction).

[Thanks to Chris Neal for the link.]

In Some Alternate Universe This Counts as "News"

Can't get no satisfaction--from new songs.
By Mark Rice-Oxley in The Christian Science Monitor.

More Admin Stuff

(While we're at it.) If you send me e-mail with a link, a comment, or whatever, please make the subject line really obvious, especially if you've never written to me before. "A question" will not get opened by me. Nor will "a question about your site." "A question about your blog" might (if I'm at work and I want to take the risk); "Why are you so sad?" won't; "a question about rockcritics daily" definitely will. "Do you have Alan Light's e-mail address?" may get opened but won't be answered. (Great, I've just gone and given the spammers more ideas.)

Site Update

I've added a few new blogs and sites to the links page. A few points about this:
a) I'm always happy to add your blog or page, so long as it's at least remotely on topic--or if you have or had or will one day have some connection to music criticism, however tenuous.
b) I don't require a link back to me unless you want to (in which case I'd appreciate it, of course). If you hate me I will still link to you. Because I'm disco and you're punk--punk.
c) Further to that, the point with my links page isn't so much that every site on there is a personal recommendation--I probably visit about a dozen of them regularly--but I want to provide an "ultimate" list of sorts, eventually. (I'm nowhere near achieving that, and there are other places that already have way way better lists than I do. But we all need goals to aim for, right?)
d) Sometimes I post about a blog on this page and then forget to add it later to the links page. If I've jipped you this way, please let me know.

Get In the Ring

Stacking up various white indie rockers in regards to their appropriation of disco rhythms:

tweeweight: Postal Service
Lightweight: Strokes, Junior Senior
Middleweight: White Stripes, LCD Soundsystem, Electric 6
Heavyweight: The Rapture, maybe?

[All right, our regularly scheduled programming will now resume.]

And Another Thing...

That irritates me about the new Strokes album is they never once pull out everything except the kick and hi-hat and break into a group chant of "The room/the room/the room is on fire/we don't need no water let the motherfucker burn/burn, motherfucker, burn!" Guess I need to see the live show.

And What IS...

The new White Stripes single? Is there even one? I heard something in the car a couple days ago with a steady 4/4 Prince beat at about 120 BPMs (just like "Seven Nation Army"), but with a monstrous synthesizer riff as well. It was on an FM rock station, so I assume it was something new...oh right, guess I should check the Internet.

The Thing Is...

I want to like the new Strokes record (see sidebar) because in general I like what they're doing here--the move towards Streetheart-style under-my-thumbness is a good one--and I think they've got a great pop sense, etc. (They don't signal any return-to-rock so much as they wisely push rock towards the pop narcotic, where it needs to be right now.) And as I've only listened to it twice all the way through, I may end up loving it still. But the singer's sore-throated Paul Westerberg affectations are really starting to bug me. I remember my friend Phil singling out the vocals as the reason he didn't like the first record but I didn't agree then. Now it's practically all I can hear, which is a drag because otherwise everything sounds a-ok.

Blender UK?

Why Dennis is a menace to Q

"If the grapevine is to be believed, and let's face it, on past history it should be, Felix Dennis is about to launch his successful US music magazine Blender in the UK."
By Dylan Jones in The Guardian.

Critical Cliches

A partial list by coolfer.com, courtesy of the rock and roll report.

Everyone's a Wenner

Taking down Rolling Stone. A profile of Tiffany Cook and her 'zine Out of the Blue. By Monica Torline in The Marion Star.

"It can take Rolling Stone down. I always say 'when.' I never say 'if.'"

New Blog Alert

The Original Soundtrack by Geeta Dayal.

"The tremendous amount of intelligent cultural criticism and discourse surging through the blogosphere makes me wonder why there aren't more media studies academics catching on. Dick Hebdige, this place is callin' for you, man! Simon Frith, where's your head at?"

I'm Not Familiar With...

John Scalzi, but maybe I should be. The man has not just a blog but a virtual network of web stuff! Including an interview with himself about being a movie critic.

[Thanks to Anthony Yungerman for the tip.]

The Hegemo's Creative Class Warfare...

Is Sarah Riegel's blog.

As a proud former contributor (er, one-time contributor anyway) to Kitschener, Sarah's cool Q&A 'zine from a few years back, it's nice to see her online with a blog celebrating last night's huge Liberal party/Dalton McGuinty victory (or, just as much to the point--PC/Common Sense Revolution defeat) in Ontario. As Sarah writes, "They [the PC party] made Ontario a meaner and uglier place to live...and not just their own meanness either, their disregard for the less fortunate. But equally as reprehensive was the meanness and the anger they brought out in their opponents."

Quote

"The point
is that
pop
doesn't
work
around
good
records
or
pretty voices
or
cute people
--those are
only
details.
Really, it
happens
off
superheroes
and
superdollars,
off
hyped
mass hysteria
and
deepdown
social change,
off short-term
collective
insanities.
People
aren't
relevant."
--Nik Cohn, Pop: From the Beginning, 1969 (p.80)

Do Movie Critics Need to Enroll in the School of Rock?

This is a question Mark Jenkins raises in Knowing the Score, from his "What Goes On" column in Washington City Paper.

First off, I don't follow some of his general points about the movie itself. To wit:

"In fact, most of Lost's exteriors look so much like L.A., albeit with Japanese signs, that it would have been cleverer to have actually shot the movie there...Rather than pose as a knowing glimpse at Tokyo--which it certainly isn't--the film could have used a simulated Japanese city as a indeterminate backdrop for the estrangement of the upscale 'global nomad.'"

But part of the point of the movie is in finding the intersections and disconnections between the two cultures, and I think the very idea of "simulation" is in fact central to this aspect of the story. The Japanese appropriation of American culture--I keep returning in my head to the shot of the guy playing heavy metal guitar through some futuristic video game--is complex: both detached and plugged in (and sad/funny) at the same time. I've no idea how accurate Coppola is in regards to all this, but to me it's the part of the story that's actually the most intriguing (truth is, I got a little bored with the central characters).

On the other hand, I agree with the general sentiment of this comment, even if it is rather sweeping:

"Yet few film critics seem to know or care anything about music. Even old-fashioned orchestral scores are rarely discussed by most movie reviewers, and pop is usually ignored unless it's unavoidable: Purple Rain, say, or something starring Madonna."

And of Lost in Translation in particular he writes, "pop music isn't merely the context. It's also the crux. Lost's most telling scenes rely on songs to convey what the film's sparse or literally incomprehensible dialogue does not."

Oddly enough, though I agree that the music does play a central role in the film, I don't think it really has all that great of an emotional impact (except in a few scenes, which I mentioned on an earlier post somewhere), so in this particular case I don't think the movie critics by and large are being all that negligible. But what Jenkins says of LIT I would apply tenfold to The Virgin Suicides, a movie I fail to understand how anyone can even think about without referring to the soundtrack.

An Anonymous Source Writes:

re: Skull Kontrol

"New Rock Critic" probably refers to Mark Jenkins, one of, if not the longest-serving active rock critics in D.C. He was often a target for local punk vitriol, in spite of being a strong, long-time advocate for the D.C. punk scene. Then again, it could be about anyone.

I was never a huge Skull Kontrol fan, but Circus Lupus, the band S.K. singer Chris Thompson was with from 1990-1993, was one of my very favorite bands of the 1990s. I think their album Super Genuis is one of the great slept-on punk records of the era.

More on Skull Kontrol.

[Editor's note: Ahh, that Mark Jenkins. Hey, I know him! Well, I don't know him, but I've heard of him before and I linked to his column, and in web parlance that's practically the same thing as being his best friend, no?]