We all know the Billboard Top 100 is a sham; it’s a meaningless list of vacuous posers and pitch-shifted payola. The bands, singers, and studios that make it to the top of their Singles Charts, Hot Canadian Digital Singles Charts, or even the Bubbling Ringtones Chart, only got
Relatively Clean Rivers, “Hello Sunshine” (download) I’m not sure how many people recognized the reference to Relatively Clean Rivers in the stories a few months back about Adam Gadahn, the American who joined al Qaeda. Gadahn’s father, Philip, was the lead singer of the amazing, obscure psychedelic folk
Right now there are thousands—nay, millions—of disaffected youths out there yearning for a music that speaks to the anger welling up inside—but without devolving into something that’s just loud, screamy, and stupid. What I’m saying is that hardcore, that originally American Art Brut, like jazz
South by Southwest, that bastion of independent music, Web 2.0 crowdsourcing folksonomy panels, and drunken mid-level industry types, hasn’t always been such an established tradition. It took a good 20 years for that magnificent phoenix to rise out of the ashes of the late ’80s underground, through
Richard Ayoade said it best on an episode of Time Trumpet as to why, every day, he was compelled to watch an ape being savagely raped on television because “he had to take the pulse of the nation.” Truer words have never been spoken. And right now the pulse of
While everybody else was fighting for attention to get their year-end lists in by the 31st, I was lying in wait, culling the extremes, the ins and outs, to strain through the finest opinionated cheesecloth, so what’s left is only the purest top-10 filtrate possible before snorting
[ note: technical difficulties with some of these videos. all, however, run fine if push the play button.—ed. ] If there’s one thing that I identify with the holiday season, it’s that sense of malaise of long car rides to visit family, only to sit down in cozy sweaters
Throughout the history of the written word and the recorded sound, there’s been a large discrepancy between what people listen to and what actually gets written about. Critics need something to write—there are columns to fill and ink to use, and two-word reviews are hard to write
As the recent loss of OiNK sits heavy in our hearts, I’d like to take some time out to think about the other file-sharing applications that have come before us and made the world a better place. Not the cold and utilitarian Napsters or the sleazy-yet-reliable
What’s in a band name? A meaningless handle dreamt up after throwing enough random adjectives together, or some obscure drug reference/street name/sexual maneuver that will only mean something to the other band members? Or could it in fact be part and parcel of the overall pathos conveyed
