Idolator is spending the weekend melting away in the desert sun in Indio, California at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival (read our recap of Day 1 here). Saturday’s lineup was light on the pop, but we powered through the day’s rising temps to get to the climax of our Saturday — getting our disco diva on during the Scissor Sisters’ late-night set. Jump below for all of the details of Day 2:

MOST FABULOUS: As if this superlative could belong to anybody but the Scissor Sisters. While other festgoers were feeling the mellow, ethereal vibe of Arcade Fire on the main stage, the disco-pop outfit started a dance party in the Mojave tent that got everybody’s booty shaking and heart palpitating. We’d place them right up there with Robyn as an act that deserves a bigger stage to strut their stuff on.

BEST DRESSED: Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters, sporting a shimmering disco ball hoodie, seen above. (What did you expect him to wear, cotton? Pshh!)

MOST RIDICULOUS: A few wacky energy-creating devices were spread throughout one section of the grounds – a swing, a see-saw, and a bunch of bicycles, all said to create energy that helps power the lights when activated by manual force. Basically, this is the only way you can get hipsters to exercise.

BIGGEST RELIEF: Everyone seemed to know who Arcade Fire was!

PEOPLE I DIDN’T SEE: All of these celebrities.

MOST DAZZLING LIGHT SHOW: Animal Collective began their show on the Coachella stage with a magnificent, foreboding light spectacular. If you weren’t on drugs while watching it, you probably felt like you were.

BIGGEST SELF-REVELATION: I like Mumford & Sons! I’ve been aware of all the good press and outstanding reviews that the English folk rock band has received the past year, but never thought it was much my cup of Chamomile. But last night, the group busted out one of the most passionate, enthusiastic performances of the whole weekend (complete with debuting a new song, “Lover In The Light”), getting the massive crowd to jig along to their knee-slapping tunes — myself included. You just picked up a new fan, fellas!

MOST INTERACTIVE: Arcade Fire hoisted a mysterious black box above the stage, and only revealed its contents at the end of their show (right before a four song encore) – out poured hundreds of glowing balloons, many of them changing color in sync. You felt like the belle of the ball if you were lucky enough to snag one.

THE MOST DELICIOUS THING I HAVE EVER EATEN: A red velvet cookie ice cream sandwich with red velvet ice cream. I’m drooling all over again looking at this photo. I may just buy another one today as I’m baking in the 100 degree heat and pat the sweat off my face with it like a gym towel.

Come back tomorrow to get the full scoop on the final day of Coachella, including just how late Kanye West will inevitably begin his headlining set. (We’re taking bets – my friends say 45 minutes late, I’m putting my money on a solid hour.)

Not surprisingly, Bruce Springsteen‘s Working On A Dream is projected to take the top spot on next week’s album charts away from Taylor Swift, who gripped on to No. 1 for five post-Christmas weeks (Taylor will hold on to No. 2, probably, don’t worry). Bruce’s 250,000-album sales tally isn’t too surprising, but the numbers that HITS is foreseeing for the bottom of the top 10 are more than slightly distressing. You can chalk it up to the weather, the power outages, or just general malaise surrounding the impending apocalypse, but making the top 10 on next week’s chart will likely only take 25,000 sales—possibly the lowest total ever for the No. 10 slot, with either Keyshia Cole or a compilation of WWE entrance themes barely sliding past that threshold by Sunday. Maybe that’s not a big deal, but consider this: If Merriweather Post Pavilion had been released just one week later, we would have been subjected to wall-to-wall blog raves over how Animal Collective landing in the top ten meant that a bold new direction for popular music was nigh. Instead, we just have the end of recorded music as we know it to worry about. No big deal. [HITS]

Animal Collective’s Fleet Foxes-slobbered-on, Kanye-endorsed video for “My Girls” has been bumpin’ around for a few days and has been getting some pretty positive praise, despite generally looking like an expensive version of Green Man from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. And more than any lyric on Merriweather Post Pavilion, the chorus to “My Girls” has people Tweetinging or Tumblring or whatever the fuck they do now. The most common reading on (always-accurate!!!11) lyric sites is:

I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things like a social status
I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls

Sure, in hard economic times, it’s rockcrit 101 to champion dudes who sing about the joys of simplicity and domestic life. What twentysomething who just got laid off from his graphic design job doesn’t want to occasionally be reminded that there are more important things in life than bottle service? (Conversely, politics blog The American Scene is paints Sr. Panda as a crunchy conservative in his “longing for property and for home.” What?)

But, really, fuck the economy. Is this dude saying “adobe slats” or “adobe slabs”? And what does that even mean?

Says SongMeanings.com commenter tonyjames:

adobe slabs refers to building a home from the ground up like way back in the day. basically stating that as father he’s going to work hard in providing for his children. but yes i agree that while most animal collective songs are a little difficult to interpret on the first try, this one is way easy to understand. its in general a song about a man providing for his family and making his father proud in the process.

So yeah, I love the sentiment and, hell, I even love this bloopy-bloppy mess of a song. But even so, I just can’t look past the fact that this is a crappy lyric. And I overlooked “Are we human or are we dancer.” Dig it:

1. By its very definition, social status is not a material thing. At all. Remember when David Cross tried to buy a house on “indie hipster cred”? Doesn’t work!

2. It’s a line about growing up and taking care of your wife and kids but still sung with that Peter Pan syndrome fake-naïveté that these guys haven’t abandoned since they were murmuring “I am the pantha!” through a Line 6 pedal.

3. To force the rhyme of “slat” and “stat[us]” they sort of leave off the “-us” reducing it to “a social stat” which is really like cutie-poo Hollertronix board slang given new life as song lyric. Nix social stat? Totes awes fam bros!

4. “Adobe” is like the least musical word humanly possible, next to maybe “coprophagia” or “phlegmatic” or “weltanschaung.”

5. With four walls and some slabs (or slats), the Panda Clan still doesn’t exactly have a roof.

I dunno. After looking at that cover for seven hours, maybe he means Adobe Photoshop?

How successful are people expecting the new Animal Collective album to be? So successful that Spin‘s Charles Aaron is worried that Merriweather Post Pavilion will become as ubiquitous as Moby’s Play—an album where all but one track was licensed to commercials. This is to say that Aaron is predicting it will be as successful as one of the most successful albums in recent memory, and he is worried that this will make him dislike it. Aaron seems aware of how crazy this is, but all the self-flagellation about his coyly authentic taste lapse doesn’t excuse the fact that he nevertheless wrote a piece about it, nor that he felt enough ownership of a Moby album to be offended when its songs showed up on soap operas, nor that he, like the rest of the internet, is somehow convinced that MPP is going to be a major crossover smash. But why?

Aaron’s only evidence seems to be that a lot of the people have written about it, and that Entertainment Weekly gave it an A-. (An A minus, you guys!) Unlike Aaron, we have the advantage of writing after the album’s release, so we can look at its position on iTunes. After a week of availability there, it’s the No. 5 best-selling album—behind the Twilight soundtrack, Taylor Swift, and the Bon Iver EP, which was released the same day as MPP and is sitting at No. 2.

Ah, but maybe, like Play, it will be licensed to lots of commercials and get noticed that way? Even Aaron admits this is unlikely—”it’s hard to imagine them licensing ‘Lion in a Coma’ to Nokia,” he generously notes in a parenthetical—and there seems to be a world of difference between Moby’s yuppie-friendly blend of blues samples and house and Animal Collective’s hippie-derived drones and group singing. But the overexposure, in Aaron’s reckoning, is going to come from a different source than with Moby’s album. Instead of being forcibly informed that people he dislikes have an emotional connection with a piece of music he does like at “a Starbucks on the New Jersey Turnpike,” the overexposure here would be more virtual.

And now, an oversaturation similar to what Moby willfully engendered via multi-platform licensing over more than a year could be happening, somewhat organically, to Animal Collective — even before their album’s official release and without the attendant financial windfall — via blogs, websites, YouTube, and assorted online jabberwocky.

Aha! What we’re talking about here, then, is not actual success, but Internet success, which is a different beast entirely. By that measure, of course, Animal Collective are already wildly successful. But it seems a little strange that this is what constitutes making it for the modern musical enterprise: not the awareness of casual listeners, the monetary rewards of actual sales, and the cultural ubiquity afforded by a presence on television and in movies, but the warm glow of blogged concert pix, fan-made videos, and people having “SummertimeClothes” as a username on discussion boards.

If this is the success Aaron is worried about, then he has nothing to fear. This is a safe form of acclaim, a small-stakes version of selling out that leaves everyone but the artist satisfied. If Animal Collective never crosses over to the real world, then no one drinking latte in an SUV will ever be playing the album; all we will have to contend with is the affection of other people on the Internet, who are not so unlike you and me, after all. If the band doesn’t get the reward of real-world sales, then it can never leave us, the cossetted bosom of true admirers that have made it what it is. It can stay small, stay in its little hometown and never escape. And if all its ubiquity is on Web sites, then these are easily avoided. We never watch something we don’t choose to watch, after all. This could only be a problem if we spend all our time on the Internet.

But, of course, we do. This is the odd bifurcation of the moment in which we find ourselves: a fragmented musical landscape in which “crossover” means only a jump from the country charts to the pop charts, but we are all loath to admit the new reality. We yearn for the days when we could complain about a band selling out—when Nirvana could cross over and make us all argue about the wrong people liking things. Maybe it will happen for Animal Collective. But if it does, will we even notice? Or will we just assume it’s successful because it’s successful on the Internet?

Is Animal Collective the New Moby? [Spin, via PGWP]

Admission: I’m an Animal Collective fan at Idolator.com. Yep. I’m a real bro’s bro. I know we are hated around these parts, and I tend to keep my mouth shut when Maura is on one of her rants about them. She seems to think that AC fans are uniformly crazy, and I’ve been defending them, saying not all of us are crazy, and some of us are quite nice, I swear, and just give us a chance. Well, after today’s foofaraw in the weird, wild world of Brooklyn Vegan’s comments section, I’m beginning to think maybe she has a point. Just look at the case of one Seth [last name redacted because we aren't jerks], who felt the wrath of the mouth-breathing Animal Collective faithful.

There was some bad shit going down with counterfeit tickets at the Bowery show. As I was going in some people got stopped when the guy scanned their tickets. He asked them if they’d bought them from a guy (he said his name, but I can’t remember what it was) on Craigslist for $100 (!) and they said yes. He said they were the tenth people that night who’d got caught in the same scam. So someone out there made a LOT of money from last night’s show.

Uh-oh! Sounds like trouble in paradise and a major bummer! Anonymous, part deux, also got jobbed… and this time he has a name:

Yeah, I unfortunately bought them. The name on the ticket was Seth [redacted]. By the time I got there they said it was over 20 people who got turned away

I’m not as mad about my money (well I really am) but the fact that the band didn’t get any of it.

Seth’s been a bad boy! And isn’t it charming how this guy really just cares about the band, not his own loss of money? Oh, wait. Never mind. He is mad about the money. Or something.

mp77 chimes in with a reasonable argument:

I heard about that ticket scam, sucks for those people, but I do question who thinks buying a scalped e-ticket is a good idea in the first place.

…but the mob is readying its pitchforks! Another anonymous:

That sucks about that scam – any way we find out this guy and fuck him up?

joe finds a way:

hhaha that dude seth [redacted] tried to sell me tickets but i caught him scamming and told him to fuck off.
[phone number redacted]
thats his phone number
[email redacted]
thats his email
search him on facebook too and spam his ass.
DONT FUCK WITH ANIMAL COLLECTIVE FANS

Wow. All of Maura’s worst suspicions, confirmed in that final sentence from joe. Are AC shows gonna turn into Dead shows when the frat boys started coming? Eesh.

There’s more! Another anonymous is getting litigious:

Thanks joe, unfortunately not everyone was as diligent as you. Good thing at least some people didn’t get scammed. Does anyone know the manager or promoter so this info can be forwarded on so they can take this dude to court?

jeff doucette crosses various lines here:

Seth [redacted]. Haaaaaaaaa !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Kid went to UPenn…he works at [business name redacted] on E 11th St.

[business name redacted]

[address redacted]
New York, NY 10009
United States

PH: [phone number redacted]

Seth’s cell, as someone posted already, is [phone number redacted]

emails:

[email addresses redacted]

he also uses [redacted] as his ID for everything.

I think he lives in TriBeCa somewhere.

Anonymous 3:41 really has the NYPD’s priorities out of whack:

I cannot believe this Seth dude is stupid enough to actually pull this scam and think he could get away with it. In all probability this could land him in jail, I bet Police have already questioned him.

Uh, right, 3:41. A few voices of reason percolate near the end:

I’m not Seth, don’t know him….I swear. But, What if he sold them to the dude who scammed you all? Never, ever buy these ticketfast tickets from CL.

I agree with whoever made the point that Seth sold that ticket to someone, and then that someone perpetrated the scam. I think seth is an IDIOT for selling a ticketfast ticket, but I highly doubt he’s the scammer

Whatever, dudes, you don’t eff with Animal Collective fans! The mob cries “vendetta!”

Has anyone filed a police report yet?
A buddy of mine got scammed by this guy & has had no luck reaching him. He tried calling both offices where he used to work, but this kid no longer works at either place.

You have to call the police, call the precint where Bowery is located I dont know which number it is, most likely its already being investigated. You will probably have to go down there and file a police report.

My take? It’s Craigslist! If you didn’t want to be scammed then don’t use it. It’s like the Wild West in there. Posting people’s personal information? Hmm. A tad gauche, if you ask me. Also, slap a big [sic] all over this story, okay?

Animal Collective @ Grand Ballroom – NYC – pics [Brooklyn Vegan via nervousacid]

The new video for Animal Collective’s “My Girls,” which recalls all those repurposed-from-European-TV clips of classic rock bands that used to fill countless hours of VH1 and all those dripping-paint videos that were so hot in 2008—not to mention maybe, just maybe, Bunnicula—is located after the jump. Quick, can you come up with the most hyperbolic bit of hyperbole to describe it? Maybe I will give a prize to the person who can out-freak-out the rest of you! Why not, it’s almost the end of the day, right?

Animal Collective – My Girls [HT: Every blog ever]
[Also, HT to Matthew Perpetua for the headline, which was inspired by his assertion that Merriweather Post Pavilion is way more inspired by Underworld than people have wanted to admit yet]

During the Bush administration, everyone seemed to agree: there were no protest songs. Or, at least, no good ones. At any rate, it definitely wasn’t like the ’60s. In her latest blog post for NPR, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein provides a welcome correction to this idea, noting both how many protest songs there were and how widespread the perception was that releasing a protest song was a bad idea. But even if there were protest songs, surely they didn’t have the same effect as in the ’60s, right?

Well, that depends whether we’re talking about an actual effect or an assumed effect, and when it comes to the ’60s, we always seem to be talking about the assumed effect. That decade’s hagiographers have been very successful at encouraging the idea that music helped to end the war, but just because people were listening to Bob Dylan doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have opposed the war without him. As for our current decade, the implication seems to be that because the Dixie Chicks got into trouble for making a snide anti-Bush remark, the powers that be must have a vested interest in suppressing music that expressed opposition to the government—which would then mean that protest songs are indeed dangerous. This was a real perception, certainly real enough to have a chilling effect, as Brownstein remembers:

My own band, writing and recording our fifth record during the winter of 2001, put more than a few songs about Bush and the war on what was to become One Beat—specifically “Combat Rock” and “Faraway.” It’s interesting to note that, upon the album’s release in early 2002, interviewers focused on the so-called risk we were taking by including those songs.

Ultimately, though, it’s unlikely that the administration’s effort to stifle dissent was aimed at music specifically. More likely is that it was aimed at the press (successfully) and at partisans more generally; pop was just collateral damage. Still, maybe it was ignored because music has gotten so toothless that it’s not worth worrying about anymore, right? Well, not really. The dominant view of the ’60s always forgets all the bubblegum and parent-pop that was even more popular than the politically engaged stuff, and overstates the reach and importance of the artists we’ve come to value. It seems more likely that music wasn’t more politically engaged in the ’60s; rather, it was more culturally prominent, more of a megaphone for the values of the majority, and thus more representative of public opinion. When music is smaller, why should politics pay attention to it?

The funny thing about all this, of course, is that the election of Barack Obama represents a rejection of “the ’60s,” or at least its dominance over our political and cultural dialogue. By picking Obama over Hillary Clinton during the primaries, Democratic voters seemed to indicate a desire to move away from arguments about culture war and identity politics. Music, on the other hand, still seems stuck in the boomer mire; even the supposedly transformative album of 2009 can be legitimately described as “psychedelic.” There seems a disconnect here.

Eight Years Gone [NPR]

The secret to gluing gobs of eyeballs to your music blog? How about “Animal Collective – ‘My Girls’ (Special Obama Inaug Remix Edition) (dedicated to Sully the Airline Pilot)”? (Be sure to click through to the whole “cover.”) [Catbirdseat]

The secret to gluing gobs of eyeballs to your music blog? How about “Animal Collective – ‘My Girls’ (Special Obama Inaug Remix Edition) (dedicated to Sully the Airline Pilot)”? (Be sure to click through to the whole “cover.”) [Catbirdseat]

Sure, it was an off week for new releases (the Derek Trucks Band?), but the coming week’s album-sales chart is projected to hit a new low, with Taylor Swift’s Fearless snagging the No. 1 spot despite its total sales projected as coming in somwhere under the 60,000-copy mark. Looks like the chart is primed for a certain act the entire Internet is talking about to make a chart run, no? [HITS Daily Double]

“We need them to be ‘considered good/relevant’ so that we can be ‘considered good/relevant.’ Now that they have ‘made it’, webzines/blogs/pitchforks can pat themselves on the back because this is our child. We raised them. We pulled them from the womb of the obscurity, raised them, fed them, nourished them, created them, loved them, used them, experienced them, grown with them, and now they have grown to have an alledged impact on modern society.” Hipster Runoff discusses how the praised-to-the-skies psych outfit Animal Collective “is a band created by/for/on the Internet,” and it’s probably one of the better deconstructions of that band’s hothouse popularity that I’ve read yet. [Hipster Runoff]

So Animal Collective gave away a “strictly limited, rare and exclusive mix cd” to people who pre-ordered their accolade-covered new album Merriweather Post Pavilion from Rough Trade, and the disc included tracks by the likes of Erykah Badu and Grouper. Given that the album in question was patrolled by the Web Sheriff like it was made of solid gold, I have to assume that someone went to great pains to clear the distribution of every track? [gorilla vs. bear]

In a comment on his Morrissey review earlier this week, fellow Idolatorian Mike Barthel mentioned that his antipathy toward Animal Collective was so strong, he couldn’t even understand why other people liked them:

Why do I hate AC? I’ve gotten into it elsewhere, and yeah, like Maura said, there hasn’t really been a proper platform to air any writer’s grievances at length. I just really, really don’t like them, to the point that I don’t even really understand why other people like them. I actually spent about an hour today talking to a former AC-hata who was trying to talk me into liking the new album, and I gave it an honest, serious try, and it made me want to stab knitting needles in my eyes.

That’s some serious hate there, but I completely understand. There are some bands that I loathe so much that it clouds my reason. The rational centers of my brain are so opposed to them that I can’t understand why any thinking bidepal creature would ever deign to listen to such garbage.

There’s a definite divide between the bands that give me the Hate Shakes™ and bands that I just don’t like. For example, I get why high school kids dig the Doors (I know I did), and, heck, I can even see why kids got into the horrid nu-metal of the late ’90s/early ’00s. Sure, the thought of a Limp Bizkit song’s existence makes my kidneys want to jump out through my eyeballs, but I sort of understand the band’s underlying appeal.

But then we have a band like Kings of Leon. I know what you are thinking. They’re harmless and mediocre, right? Yeah, I know, but context has to be part of this kind of intense hatred. The Kings of Leon garner so much acclaim for their hook-free, watered-down faux-Southern rock garbage when more deserving bands (like everyone else in the world making music) don’t get covered with the same fervor, and it fills me with loathing. Adding fuel to this fire is that most of their fans seem to agree that the band is getting worse, yet the coverage is almost always praiseworthy. (This happens a lot when artists become “feature” bands that garner features over reviews. Features are generally fawning puff pieces meant to sell mags or generate clicks, so who cares if some Grumpy Gus in the back thinks the band sounds like putrified dog squeeze?) God, just talking about this band gives me the Hate Shakes™. You see? I’m so blinded by hate that I can’t even elucidate a tenable position on this. I just shake and hate and shake some more. Blergh!

How about you? Whom do you hate so much that you can’t even fathom why someone would ever listen to them? Who gives you the Hate Shakes™?

Also, Nine Inch Nails sucks! Haha. Kidding. I just wanted to feed the beast.

Every so often, we like to take a look at the closing lines of the week’s biggest new-music reviews. Today’s candidate for appraisal is Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, which—after some of the craziest pre-release anticipation this side of a Jonas Brothers album—comes out on vinyl tomorrow:

• “Animal Collective have spent the decade following their own path, figuring out what their music is capable of while also working to bring more listeners into their world. On Merriweather Post Pavilion, their commitment has paid off tremendously.” [Pitchfork]

• “In years past, Animal Collective have been cast as perpetual Peter Pans, forever stuck in childhood fantasias. But beneath the body-moving throbs and coruscating noises of Merriweather Post Pavilion, themes of domestic duty and devotion abound. On the resplendent closer, ‘Brother Sport,’ Panda consoles his older brother after their father’s death, advising him to follow his own voice. As the beat grows increasingly joyous, the song sends a message to family and fans alike: ‘Open up your throat,’ sings Panda, and rave on.” [Spin]

• “Maybe the overwhelming, full-throated joy of it all sounds particularly radiant in the fluey gloom of winter, but right now Merriweather Post Pavilion doesn’t just seem like one of the first great records of 2009, it feels like one of the landmark American albums of the century so far.” [Uncut]

• “Fuck me, this is brilliant.” [The Quietus]

INDIE TEENS IN HAVING NO SENSE OF HUMOR SHOCKER aka animal coLOLctive: what happened? [C:E:L:E:B:R:A:T:I:O:N]
Animal Collective [MySpace]

Oh you guys, how perfect is it that the Animal Collective album leaked on Christmas. Well, Santa Claus is kind of a beardo… although if he really wanted the crazed refresh-slamming masses of indie saddoes out there to believe in him again, he wouldn’t have made the leak a 128kbps rip from vinyl. [elbo.ws]

This morning, an e-mail purporting to be from one of the members of the avant-garde outfit/insane fanboy breeders Animal Collective went out, and the e-mail was a plea for the rest of their forthcoming album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, to leak because, hey, two songs had made their way to the Internet already. “[The] album is intended to be heard as a whole, and nothing bothers us more than individual tracks leaking and ruining the the overall album experience,” the e-mail said. And it was in all lower-case, so it had to be the real thing! Right?

Well, as it turns out, the e-mail was a hoax perpetuated by someone who actually hacked into the e-mail account of Animal Collective member Brian Weitz. (Sorry, all you message-board denizens who have been trying to will its unauthorized release through excessive posting!) Bradford Cox of Deerhunter, another band who makes the indie kids’ knees go weak, addressed the situation on his blog: “Total Bullshit. Someone actually had the nerve to hack into their e-mail account and send this out. The truth is that AC do not want their album to leak and are trying very hard to avoid the drama around said album that has risen to a fever pitch.” Is this really what it’s come to, you guys? E-mail hacks?!

Anyway, Cox had a few suggestions for the bored types who have nothing better to do than sit on the Internet and post “Leak. Leak. Leak.” for hours and hours:

Back in the 90′s when I was first starting to make 4-track tapes I had a game where I would make a fake version of an album I was anticipating. If Pavement’s Brighten the Corners were coming out soon, I had to wait till release day to hear it. I would record a set of songs that I would want the Pavement album to sound like. Some of those songs ended up becoming Atlas Sound and Deerhunter songs years later.

My advice to those who are so desperate for AC’s album to leak is to pick up instruments and make your own version of what you would want it to sound like. Respect the BANDS wishes and wait till release day. Then you can compare your new songs with theirs. Who knows. Maybe your album will be the one people are wanting to leak next year.

This, I have to say, is probably the nicest way I’ve ever heard someone say “Um, get a life.”

Weird Energy Why? [Deerhunter via Fluxtumblr]

Next year’s upstate New York installment of the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival will be curated by the Flaming Lips; the “bands perform full albums” portion of the fest will feature Suicide’s 1st LP and the Dirty Three’s Ocean Songs. Also on the bill for the weekend, which takes place at the old-school Catskills resort Kutshers: Animal Collective and Panda Bear, a one-two punch that means we’re going to see about 85,563 freaked-out comments about the festival on Brooklyn Vegan between now and next September. [ATP]

The rise of the artist blog as official mouthpiece in 2008 may have been in part because record labels can’t afford to hire decent PR staff anymore, but hey, you take the good with the bad. And there was a lot of good to come out of artists hitting up Tumblr, MySpace, et al; these blogs were really effective at humanizing the vacuum presented by endless paparazzi shots and press releases, whether through “clarity posts,” in which artists put gossips on blast, or posts explaining what life is like when bands graduate to bigger tours, or just posts about how they liked shoes. After the jump, nine examples of why more artists should make a tour stop in Blogtown. Not only is the trip entertaining, its fruits give people like me great material!

9. Travis McCoy refers to an indier-than-thou fan as “soooooo Saddle Creek!” Because I have used this insult in my day-to-day life since it was first posted.

8. Tracey Thorn explains the concept of “slow recording.” Hey, it’s more witty than just saying “sorry the record’s taking forever.”

7. Grizzly Bear is forced to stand in front of the class and apologize for posting an Animal Collective song. Because what better way can future pirates be reminded that no one is safe from the overly polite wrath of the piracy-fighting company Web Sheriff?

6. John Mayer files a bug report. Mayer’s blog posts have been really effective at winning over those who couldn’t stand his song about running through the halls in high school and screaming at the top of his lungs. First, you’re thinking his observations on celebrity are kind of right-on; next, you’re allowing for the idea that he’s a pretty decent guitar player; finally, you’re buying “Daughters” from the iTunes Store during a particularly weepy late night in front of the computer.

5. Lily Allen offers up an artist’s rendering of Perez Hilton’s day-to-day life. I normally am loath to think that fat jokes are at all funny, but if anyone deserved to be mocked over his appearance, it’s the inexplicably popular, semi-literate gossip blogger known as Mario Lavandiera. (One’s own medicine, etc.) Allen has also been an expert deployer of the “clarity post”—for example, letting people know that flashing the paparazzi was a wardrobe malfunction, and not a way to stay in the press between records.

4. “Weird Al” Yankovic gets into the workings of his iTunes rush-release. After releasing “Whatever You Like” to iTunes—and watching iTunes screw up the launch—Al goes into whether or not he was happy (spoiler: he wasn’t) and whether he’d rush a song so that his parody coincided with the source material being at the top of the charts (spoiler: he would) I wish more artists would do this!

3. Courtney Love takes on Ryan Adams, bloggers, and the world. She’s been taking people on online since the pre-Firefox era, and she’s since run with her blogging, fusing style tips with rants in a way that Kanye West can only dream of. She’s also one of the few people to call out the weird class issues that often rear their head in gossip writing (“One thing that DOES enrage me is when urban sophisticates with great breeding and cynical cognition of life make FUN of being robbed blind”), and for that she at least deserves a hat-tip.

2. Pete Wentz cries foul about post facto product placement in Fall Out Boy’s “I Don’t Care” video. The post was removed shortly after it went up, but the controversy did result in “the Spaghetti Cat cut” of the clip.

1. Kanye on Bonnaroo. The ne plus ultra of how an artist should use his or her blog to get to his or her fans—and the media—directly. It has anger, it has passion, it has little bits of conspicuous consumption sprinkled within (hope he got a new MacBook Air!). It didn’t make the people who waited until the wee hours of the Bonnaroo morning for his set any less mad, but it sure got the message out more effectively than a tersely written statement that employed the phrase “regrets any inconvenience.”

80 ’08 (And Heartbreak)

People really like Animal Collective! How do I know this? Well, any post that happens to have the words “animal,” “collective,” and “leak” in them does really well for us, Google-wise, even if said post happens to be talking about something wholly unrelated to Merriweather Post Pavilion making its way out to the Internet. (It hasn’t yet! Don’t worry!) But today there’s even stronger evidence that there are bros out there who are are, like, Tokio Hotel fan levels of mental about this band, thanks to a Brooklyn Vegan post that mentioned a password-protected ticket sale for an upcoming Animal Collective show at New York’s Bowery Ballroom. And if you thought that password was going to be given out lickety-split to the commenting masses, well, you must not know any real music snobs.

The comment section, of course, went into instant freak-out mode, with these pleas being posted over a 15-minute span:

so what is the password?

anyone know?

come on passwordddd
PLEASE

what is the fucking password

how come not one single person knows this?
is anyone able to get tix at all?

Of course, this led to some people claiming that they did have the password, and that it was “queef,” or “imastupidfuckingidiotforreadingthis,” or “vampire weekend”; others said they had it but would give it up for a price, a kidney, etc. But my mind was blown by this claim, which—well, I’ll just let you read it, and you can assume the rejoinder:

I heard the password was shown during HD TNA Impact on Spike Tonight, but Time Warner doesn’t carry Spike in HiDef. DAMMIT!!!

Yeah, somebody indeed fell for it. Jeez, people. Put down the drugs.

Animal Collective add Bowery Ballroom show, tour dates [BV]

Usually, we use The Last Word to collect the closing bon mots from the week’s biggest record reviews. But last night’s listening party for the new album by Animal Collective–Merriweather Post Pavilion, which doesn’t come out until the calendar flips to 2009–seemed worthy of a spin through Google, at the very least. A few takeaways from the event after the jump.

• “The record’s got the layered harmonies of Panda Bear’s solo turn, but not the bubblegum pop, opting instead for the stoned vibe of a friendly drum circle or an house record spun at 4 a.m. But if you take anything from this: The riotous ‘Summertime Clothes’ will be your summer jam in ’09. If they can keep this thing from leaking.” [Village Voice]

• “While tracks like the low-key ‘No More Runnin’’ are more conventionally song-oriented, the focus here is on constantly shifting textures and moods, like the central riff of ‘Daily Routine,’ which sounds like a bowling ball being thrown for a strike across the keys of an organ, or the moment on ‘Guys Eyes’ that suggests nothing so much as a backwards loop of a piano being dropped from the roof of a monastery.” [RS]

• “Appropriately, the album ends with the line ‘You’ve got so much inside/ Let it come right out,’ which, in the context of the new record, feels like an incredibly apt description of where AC stands artistically as we roll into 2009. I guess, to sum it up, all I can say is that now I’m really fucking excited for 1/20/2009. It’s going to be epic.” [CHOCOLATE BOBKA]

• “It’s strange how someone telling you the end of a movie could ruin it, but someone telling you the end of a record just makes you stoked to get there. Right? ” [8008]