You'd have knocked over the teenager I used to be by saying so, but goddamn have I gotten sick of listicles. I buy the better-looking ones and spy in on those more obvious, the ones in the big music magazines. I've written and/or contributed to a number of them myself, not counting this column; my life was more or less changed by them. So feeling like I'm over them does not come lightly. But it seems more and more as if they've hit critical mass. Even Blender isn't doing them much anymore (as our outed Anonodude has mentioned), which is sort of like Madonna not releasing singles. Maybe the listicle is finally finished.

Or maybe the formula just needs to be put to rest. At this point, listicles—most of them, anyway—have become numbingly predictable. Take Blender's 100 Greatest Indie Rock Albums Ever list from a while back. The only surprising thing about that was that people were actually surprised by it. Of course No. 1 was Pavement's Slanted & Enchanted—let's see, it placed 16th in the Spin Alternative Record Guide's Top 100 back in 1995, after it had only been out three years. Then it was fifth in Spin's Top 90 Albums of the '90s, and fourth in its Top 100 Albums 1985-2005. (I contributed to the latter, though not the Pavement entry.) What were the chances that it wasn't going to place highly on the Blender list? The listicle has become much the same as the pop charts themselves: mostly the same old shit, over and over again, without any real divergences, and lacking any real individual viewpoint.

That's the major reason I like the cover package of Signal to Noise's 50th issue so much. I don't always read this magazine closely: most of it is about improv and jazz, not styles I know much about, and its out-rock and electronica coverage tends to pass me by, though I'll note the new issue has an interesting profile of East Orange, N.J., freeform radio station WFMU. (I'll also note I've written one piece for STN, a jukebox feature with Jace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ /rupture, in 2002—the last time they ran one, as I recall. Too bad—I enjoy jukebox features wherever they run. I even like the Seattle Weekly's recent twist on it, in which artists respond to chunks of reviews of their own albums.) But publisher/editor Pete Gershon is an exceptionally warm guy in my limited email experience with him, and his commitment and enthusiasm are obvious and inspiring. And the Summer 2008 issue has a great premise: "Our Favorite Things: Signal to Noise writers and extended family throw open their closet doors and share 50 of their most-cherished musical possessions." The Things are not presented in any special order, as far as I can tell, but they're numbered, so here are the first 10 items chosen (writers in parentheses):

1. Duke Ellington Orchestra autographed photo (John Chacona)
2. Two free jazz posters (Martin Davidson, Emanem Records)
3. Muscle Shoals Sound tee-shirt (Kandia Crazy Horse)
4. Jimmy Giuffre interview cassettes (Alain Drouot)
5. 78 RPM record by unknown artist (Adam Lore, 50 Miles of Elbow Room)
6. Lead pipe left behind at Faust concert (Andrew Choate)
7. Misha Mengelberg's piano stool leg (Dan Warburton)
8. "Graydog" (Kurt Gottschalk)
9. The Azusa Plane's "For Claudia Cardinale" 7-inch (Ian Nagosk)
10. Tibetan thighbone trumpet (David Cotner)

You can see where this is going. A lot of the writing rambles—and it should. That's that this kind of thing is made for. It's favorites, not "greatest of all time," and it's stuff that means to these writers what it could to no one else. So they try to explain why, and in the process, they explain themselves.

This resonates, because much of what and why we love what we do as listeners depends on serendipity—of being in the right place at the right time, ready to have our expectations met or to be blindsided, however it happened. How it happens is the real story much of the time, especially if you're dealing with stuff that isn't poised for crossover. And STN's contributors write as if that's the starting point, even if they were heading in this stuff's direction before they knew how the rules were supposed to work. Take No. 38, Erik Davis' "vintage copy of John Fahey's The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party LP." It belonged to his father, a Berkeley folkie whose Kingston Trio titles the eight-year-old Erik never cared for. But he flipped for Dad's Faheys: "They seemed magisterial and lovely and strange, and the lack of wards let my mind 'a wander." Davis's choice, though, stands in for a missing object, and he puts it in words that are funny, cutting, and jump off the page: "[T]he heirloom I would much rather be writing about here [is] Pop's old banjo, jettisoned somewhere along the way because my step-mom said it smelled like a goat."

Such regret is rare here, though. Much of it is unabashedly nostalgic: The Big Takeover editor/publisher Jack Rabid's salute to his cherished issue of the punk 'zine Search & Destroy (No. 13) is precisely what you'd expect ("Search & Destroy taught readers how liberating and fun it is to take part in culture, rather than absorbing it passively through endless electronic devices. I hope my own mag does, today"), and nice to read for precisely that reason. Then there's Susan Archie's 12-inch by Patti Smith: "I came in contact with Lenny Kaye ... I sent him the Goodbye, Babylon box i designed for Dust-to-Digital and he asked what I would like in return. I asked, 'By any chance, do you have any copies of "Hey Joe"?'"

—-

In the spirit of election season, I'm going to give equal time here. The new Blender isn't unusual, though I enjoyed more of it than usual, particularly Rob Sheffield's Erasure column. What caught my eye was something written (without byline, as is increasingly the case throughout the magazine's front of book) about No. 10 in the mag's monthly 33 Most Wanted Songs in America:

1. Lil Wayne, "Lollipop" (Cash Money)
2. Danity Kane, "Damaged" (Bad Boy)
3. Mariah Carey, "Bye Bye" (Island Def Jam)
4. Clay Aiken, "On My Way Here" (RCA)
5. Vanessa Hudgens, "Sneakernight" (Hollywood)
6. Madonna, "4 Minutes" (Warner Bros.)
7. Three 6 Mafia, "Lolli Lolli (Pop That Body)" (Columbia/Hypotize Minds)
8. Motley Crue, "Saints of Los Angeles" (Motley)
9. Chris Brown, "Take You Down" (Jive)
10. Taylor Swift, "Picture to Burn" (Big Machine)

Over a picture of Swift at a vintage mike clutching a rhinestone-studded acoustic, it says, "Dudes: Let Taylor Swift drive your truck, OK? If you don't, she'll write one of her signature breakup songs (like this one) about how she's going to exact her revenge."

Here's what struck me: this is precisely the kind of thing you say about someone who's been releasing singles from the same album for a year and a half. Which is to say, it's an explication of how her persona has evolved, as much as on what we think of as its basic premise. You don't get to write a "signature breakup song" unless you're on your third one, at least; you don't get a "signature" anything, usually, until your second album. That's the difference between paying attention to singles versus paying attention to albums. With albums, you're absorbing the work as a whole, thus precluding the need to see how its components play out in the public sphere.

This sort of happened to me last year. I bought Rihanna's Good Girl Gone Bad, played it a number of times, and picked "Don't Stop the Music" as my favorite long before it had any traction outside of Billboard's Dance Club Play chart in terms of public recognition. By the time the song hit on the radio, etc., I was unmoved: What took everyone else so long?, I wondered. That wouldn't be the case with Taylor Swift, were I of the same apparent mind and interests as the Blender blurb.

I'm not sure I am: I haven't cared much for the little Taylor Swift I've heard. But the ongoing drama of pop as public discussion is a lot of its appeal. And I'd argue that a lot of people have gone back to being interested in it because, in part, of the way the diffused listening we've been hearing (and arguing) so much about lately. Certainly American Idol's popularity has helped as well. And it's obviously in Blender's interest, as the magazine that most aggressively sells itself to the average pop fan, to discuss it in those terms. Which is fine with me, especially now that they've finally gotten rid of that stupid "Your music buddy" tag.

The magazine that Your Correspondent assesses this week can currently be found on newsstands wrapped in a loose plastic wrapper. Typically, this packaging is enacted so that a mag can tease the potential reader with content that he/she cannot access while standing around and flipping through its pages in a store. Thus stymied, the reader is more likely to buy the issue.

This is a practice most often associated with publications catering to enthusiasts of the guitar and of pornography. Take, for instance, the latest issue of Anal Gourmand: the issue contains a pictorial featuring rising Japanese/Dutch adult star Takesa Hüügedikk, but since the issue is packaged in the manner described above, anyone curious must purchase the mag in order to see what she's up to therein.

YC wonders if Alpha Media Group Chairman Kent Brownridge, publisher Ben Madden, and editor Joe Levy concluded that Blender's July cover gal, Leona Lewis, may be the kind of young lady your mom thinks "is so elegant" yet not, shall we say, the kind of gal representatives of Blender's primary readership would knock one out to. ("Bleeding Love" strikes YC as redolent of the pre-lotsa fun, "Vision of Love"-style material that Mariah Carey was compelled to record in her role as a suitable consort for Tommy Mottola.)

So, once the cover shoot, photography, and reporting were each complete and the three possibly realized that they didn't have a home run on their hands, perhaps the idea was to boost sales by not only making in-store perusing difficult, but by promising free downloads! Yay! A card floating around the issue's wrapper includes a URL leading to a page on Rhapsody.com that offers MP3s from the likes of Tokio Hotel (misspelled as "Tokyo"), Fleet Foxes, and No Age, among others, as well as enough legal language describing the limits on this promotion to choke a fucking goat.

As for that cover story: It was up to Music Editor Rob Tannenbaum to elicit a series of interesting quotes from Lewis. But based on "Leona Lewis Wants a Cuddle...But Not the Way You Want To," the British singer either has nothing interesting to say or has been prepped by her handlers to a superhuman, Monica-Lewinsky-interviewed-by-Whitewater-prosecutors-in-1998 degree. Tannenbaum (with whom YC worked at Blender several years ago) is an uncommonly gifted interviewer, but he more or less concedes that he's not getting blood out of this particular stone. YC hopes he had a good time in Tokyo, where he interacted with Lewis during promotion, got loads of reportorial color, and probably otherwise enjoyed himself.

Elsewhere, we come to the second installment of Rob Sheffield's Station to Station, which, given that it ostensibly concerns the reunion of Yaz, seems to augur that the column will perpetually find Sheffield waxing rhapsodic over his favorite artists of the 1980s. While he breaks from type by interviewing Yaz/Depeche Mode/Erasure keyboard boffin Vince Clarke in his remote Maine village instead of relying purely on his often airless ruminations on this TV show or that gleefully plastic New Wave artist, it'd be nice to see Sheffield grappling with an artist or occurrence tethered to this moment, like... oh, YC doesn't know, Miley Cyrus or the R. Kelly trial or something.

Apart from pointing out that YC feels like Dennis Wilson's fascinating Pacific Ocean Blue should have been awarded The Guide's marquee spot for reissues over Liz Phair's slightly refigured Exile in Guyville, YC isn't moved to comment further on the July Blender.

So he'll note that this issue makes three consecutive "chick singer" covers under Levy's stewardship. Perhaps he was Rolling Stone's cheesecake advocate, as his former mag has not featured a surfeit of such cover imagery since his departure (maybe this would be unseemly during the mag's "go, go, Obama" phase). But it's past time for a male musician or a band to front Levy's Blender. And what about those lists that Blender excels at, which make similar efforts from Rolling Stone look fusty and get attention from Assholes in the AM with Schmucky and Fuckface, as well as the Topeka Pig Testicle? When is Mr. Levy going to unveil his iteration?

YC realizes that he previously voiced a concern that Levy might import too much Rolling Stone-style kiss-assery to Blender, and it doesn't seem like anything of that sort has come to pass. But it seems like Levy has relied too much on his predecessor's templates (notwithstanding the above point re: lists). It may be that, in a lousy-and-getting-lousier advertising climate, he and Mr. Brownridge are loath to tamper with proven editorial formulae. But YC thinks that, after 11 years of diligent obeisance to Jann Wenner's preferences and allegiances, Levy is free and might want to cut loose and show how he'd run a fully engaged, revitalized music magazine without having to keep Wenner's wishes at the front of his mind.

This past Monday, Idolator posted the cover image of the June 2008 Blender, which Your Correspondent assesses this week. What follows is the first comment, from Dead Air ummm Dead Air, that followed the post...

"There's not one word or image on that cover that would entice me to buy that."

The post asked Blender's new editor, "why?" Although YC is certain Idolator's writers know the answer, he'll suggest that the reason Joe Levy rolled out the red carpet for Tila Tequila is the same as why YC suspects that the page views for this post are going to be greater than if, say, the accompanying image was that of the gentleman who fronts Fucked Up. The latter is fat, while the former fits all manner of requirements for the masturbatory fodder of many young men.

The promise of images and words regarding music figures of estimable worth are hardly a guarantor of newsstand sales, and the type of reader that Blender would have been able to depend on a few years ago now fills comment boxes with invective along the lines of "OMFG, I can't believe that they're putting this creature on the cover" and "whatever happened to talent?" So why, precisely, should the big music mags do what pleases Idolator- and Pitchfork-niks? Why shouldn't Blender, like MTV, appeal to people who like to watch strippers, cocktail waitresses, and goofball dudes debase themselves?

Were YC in Joe Levy's shoes, he'd probably put Tila Tequila on Blender's cover. This is simply because doing so helps subsidize some content that would interest Idolator- and Pitchfork-niks—this was the way that Blender operated when YC worked there, and given the first two issues of Levy's tenure as the mag's editor, he doesn't see any evidence that the "respect for artists" that Levy once promised to foster in Blender's pages is resulting in an infusion of Rolling Stone fustiness. The Hippocratic Oath's first rule is "Do No Harm," and Levy hasn't harmed Blender... yet.

Indeed, Ms. Tequila—or rather, Ms Nguyen, as scribe Chris Norris refers to her— has but the most slender rivulet of a burgeoning music career upon which Blender hangs "Everybody Loves Tila": a Lil' Jon and will.i.am-assisted ep entitled Sex. Otherwise, Norris attempts to unravel this Singapore-born Sphinx, but she remains as inscrutable and unforthcoming as any woman who must promote another season of a program in which her affections are the prize. She tells Norris that she thinks that "every girl is born bisexual," which both she and Blender's editors (who dutifully place her quote in display type in the issue's table of contents) know is a good thing to say when appealing to readers once referred to by a Blender critic as "walking boners."

Norris calls upon Dr. Drew for an explanation of the kind of participant common to Shot of Love, Rock of Love, and Flavor of Love. He says they tend to be "narcissist/borderline sociopath(s)," and that "producers actually do psychological testing to find people who (bespeak) this kind of makeup...they put them in an isolation tank away from their usual anchors, in this very intense environment with someone they're attracted to and encourage them to have intense feeling for them." YC has watched very little of this kind of programming, but he wouldn't be surprised if the producers have also inculcated or reintroduced some of these unfortunate people to the joys and pains of methamphetamine.

This issue sees the debut of Rob Sheffield's first "Station to Station" column. Sheffield's prominence at Rolling Stone was mostly due to Levy's beneficence, so YC fully expected "Nonstop Erotic Cabaret," a paean to Madonna, to ricochet from non sequitur to incongruous song lyric to 21 Jump Street reference even more recklessly than his RS columns. But it's nice to see that he keeps his eye on the ball for the most part: Sheffield loves Madonna (and her new album Hard Candy) and says why in less caffeinated prose than he used at his old gig. He does often betray the sense that he listens to music and watches television by himself in such worryingly massive doses that his ability to contend with ideas other than his own is either compromised or nonexistent (a hallmark he shares fellow Blender contributing editor/Levy crony/"my opinions are so precious that I needn't ever commit to real reporting"-adherent Robert Christgau), but he seems much, much closer to the ground here than usual.

A few paragraphs ago, YC mentioned that Blender uses cover images of the likes of Tila Tequila to finance content that might enlighten blog readers, should they be able to tear themselves away from their Yeasayer-centric playlists. This issue's contender as such is "The Eyeliner Wars" by senior editor Josh Eells, a guy who consistently gets out there and ruins his shoe leather real good. He goes to Mexico City to report on the mass hysteria and frequent beatings that Mexican emo fans often endure. (Note to Dead Air Umm Dead Air: YC believes that Chuck Klosterman wrote about Mexican-American devotees of Morrissey a few years ago, so Blender's article herein cannot be tarred with the brush you suggest.)

Eells reports that sensitive boys wearing eyeliner and identifying with darkly dramatic rock music flourish in a culture that favors drama (telenovelas, masked wrestlers); but that same culture contains deeply ingrained, intertwined-with-Catholicism notions of machismo, which results in "cholos" and punks often assaulting these "faggots." Something similar happened, by the way, in England last year: a young goth girl from Lancashire named Sophie Lancaster was beaten to death by a bunch of "chavs," the cholos of their country. Since YC does not frequent emo-culture hotbeds on his computer and was thus unaware of these events, he thinks Eells has done a commendable job.

Now a few quick notes...

• YC should mention his amusement at seeing that the some of the stock questions asked to nine music figures in this year's "Summer Music Blowout" are the same he posed to a bunch of musicians in the same roundup in 2002 and 2003: in fact, he thinks he came up with some of them.

• YC was also amused by the front-of-book featurette "Armadrinkin' It," in which three oenophiles from Def Leppard opine upon the merits of various wines proffered by six musicians. Guitarist Vivian Campbell asks whether Vince Neil's Vince Petite Sirah 2006 is called "duuuuuude"; singer Joe Elliott asks of the proprietor of Little Jonathan Winery Cabernet Sauvignon 2006, "Who's Lil Jon? He named for the Robin Hood guy?"; and bassist Rick "Sav" Savage, based on the accompanying shot of the three, looks like he goes to the same hairdresser and plastic surgeon as your great aunt.

• Finally,YC thinks that, in pop music journalism, it is unwise to publish more than one major feature on the same artist inside of six months, since it bespeaks a certain "appearance of impropriety," i.e. it makes a mag look like it's in the tank for said artist. Lil Wayne is one entertaining mufugger in this issue's "Dear Superstar" feature, in which he answers—ahem—"reader questions." But since he was already profiled in a feature in Blender's March issue by the same writer behind the piece in this new issue, senior editor Jonah Weiner, the mag should probably cool it with Lil Wayne, review his record whenever it comes out, and leave it at that.

Not much else to say about the June '08 issue of Blender, except that this issue is already available on eBay.

• RJ Reynolds will not take being critiqued lightly. The tobacco company pulled all print advertising in the wake of the Camel/Rolling Stone kerfuffle; ads for its death sticks used to take up lots of space in all of the music mags.

• The auto business isn't doing so well, either. Car manufacturers have cut their magazine-ad spending by 21% across the board, meaning fewer crazy pull-outs that garnered big dollars for magazines.

• The record business, well... It's probably piling on to say this, isn't it? Especially given the goodbye notes we've seen from departing magazines over the past few years. But it's also notable that the amount of co-op advertising (advertisements from outlets that sell music that use ); in the May 2008 issue of Spin, for example, the only ad I can see from a retailer appears to be from Best Buy.)

• It's the Internet's fault! Of course! "We're putting money in Pandora and other music [sites] that in the olden days would probably all have gone to Rolling Stone," Dentsu America's executive media director Scott Daly told Crain's. "We're trying to reach young, early adopters—which Rolling Stone reaches, but it doesn't have a lock on them." And the magazines' Web sites haven't exactly filled the online void: "We tend to look for best of breed.... to date, we've typically found companion Web sites inferior to the printed product," said Daly. (Perhaps Spin's recent online efforts, which include putting the entire magazine online, have helped it stop the bleeding.) One would argue that the hermetically sealed world of blogs probably isn't the best alternative for advertisers interested in attracting people who want to actually experience things that are outside of their worldview, but my putting forth that argument could be one of the many reasons that I've been in the content business for so long.

Music magazines shaking and rattling [Crains; HT Chris Molanphy]

The best part: That's only the second-most-embarrassing thing about this particular bit of blurbage! "Remember, she is James Taylor's sister"? Yes, I think most people will remember a bit of trivia they read six lines prior. The James Taylor demographic isn't exactly made up of ADHD-addled teenagers.

Kate Taylor & the Ellis Unit tickets [Ticketmaster]
The Ellis Unit [MySpace]

Madonna, Mariah Carey, Kid Rock, John Mayer, Keith Richards, and Alicia Keys are all artists that can reasonably expect to be treated with deference in Rolling Stone whenever it is advantageous for them to consent to interviews and photo shoots. Each of these artists can expect to be covered in Blender, too, and each is teased on the cover of the mag's May 2008 issue.

In Rolling Stone's telling, John Mayer is a famous soft-rock singer-songwriter who peels off Stevie Ray Vaughan-style solos whenever he can get away with it. To Blender, he's a smart and relatively self-aware guy who knows that a lot of people think his songs are sissy shit, fit only for your uncool chick cousin and her book club buddies. Mayer knows this, and even if it's debatable that he should give much of a fuck since he's richer and has bagged more famous hawt broads than anyone reading this sentence could dream of, he's quite happy to play Blender's game.

So senior editor Josh Eels climbs aboard the Mayercraft Carrier, in which Mayer is the draw for a cruise traversing the Caribbean. To Eels, the trip mostly comprises packs of cougars and bachelorette partiers similar to the hypothetical woman described above, all enjoying the fellowship of other Mayer fans, going to his shows on the boat, and hoping to catch a candid glimpse of—or even share Patron with — the object of their affection. (Notably, the photo spread accompanying the piece, "Greetings From the Mayercraft Carrier," does not include the widely disseminated photo from the cruise in which Mayer poses in Borat's man-thong.) Eels is good at on-the-spot "wtf?"-style reportage; this kind of story is key to Blender's interest in the absurdities often found in the periphery of pop music. "What do you think of Buddy Guy?" is not part of Blender's purview.

That kind of question is, however, part of the purview of Rolling Stone, for which Joe Levy worked as an executive editor for almost eleven years until this past January, when he was hired as editor-in-chief of Blender by fellow Wenner Media dissident and current Alpha Media Group Chairman Kent Brownridge. This issue is the first in which his name is listed as such on the masthead.

When he was hired, Levy said that he hoped to inculcate more respect for artists, which is an aim of Rolling Stone, in the magazine he's now running. But for a purely cosmetic design overhaul, this issue indicates that he's working with the staff and pool of freelancers that was in place for his predecessor Craig Marks' last year, and thus the mag's philosophy and accompanying editorial apparatuses have not been monkeyed with.

Your very own Anono-Prick would think that this month's cover subject, Alicia Keys, might have indicated a shift towards "respect for artists," since AP thinks Keys' music and persona are both predicated on profoundly boring "this-is-how-proper-music-used-to-be-made" tropes. Sure enough, in "Alicia Keys Unlocked," senior editor Jonah Weiner reports that she believes that "there was so much more good music 40, 50 years ago." But Weiner unearths the fact that, due to various comments Keys made that that ranged from the anti-Bush to—dude—the pro-anarchy, the New York Police Department put Keys under surveillance prior to the Republican Convention in NYC in 2004. Although it may seem that the mere fact of a member of the creative class not much caring for the current POTUS isn't terribly noteworthy, Weiner did succeed in the unprecedented feat of interesting AP in Keys for a moment. Still, AP thinks that Keys may have been chosen to be the first cover gal of Levy's tenure because of her abundant "artistic" qualities; As I Am was released six months ago, and the promotion of the album's third single, "Teenage Love Affair," isn't much to hang a cover on.

Levy's first issue blows through the front-of-book Burner section without much fuss and includes a week-long "Phone Home" feature from a touring Kid Rock and a "Dear Superstar" sit-down with Keith Richards, in which he answers questions that are probably not from flesh and blood readers. After the Keys profile comes a "Spend $848 with..." stunt feature in which rest-of-the-world-conquering German emo-boppers Tokio Hotel spend that sum at a Hamburg Casino. (AP gets nervous when ever he writes the words "world-conquering" and "German.") AP has absolutely no confidence that these little Krauts will ever interest anyone in America beyond particularly avant-garde 11-13 year old girls, but he thinks it would be pretty cool if Tokio Hotel broke the U.S. Senior editor Victoria De Silverio touches on the issue of be-fright-wigged frontboy Bill Kaulitz's sexuality, but points out that the kid became famous for his 2003 rendition of "It's Raining Men" on the German Star Search. AP isn't sure about German culture, but he's confident that no minder in the U.S. would ever allow their tween boy charge to sing that particular song.

Then comes the Mayer piece, then "Rock's Secret Millionaires," a foldout quasi-list feature that's most likely sponsored by Mini Cooper; it seems like a bit of an afterthought. By page 73, we've reached the reviews section "The Guide," wherein Madonna's Hard Candy and Mariah Carey's E=MC² are both assessed to the tune of four stars. R.E.M.'s Accelerate, while awarded three and a half stars, is nonetheless dismissed by senior critic Jon Dolan with language far more frank than Rolling Stone would ever allow regarding that band.

And that's about it. The feature well is nowhere near as crowded as recent issues, and there's no ingenious, irreverent list of the "top" this or that. It's quite possible that, given the two or three-month lead time, much of this content was initiated by Marks. If that is the case, then it would be a very foolish editor indeed who would swan in and say "I don't care how long this has been planned and how much $$$ has been dropped; this is Day 1, and everyone must start over now."

AP's supposes that new bosses don't always bulldoze into a new workplace, changing everything that worked immediately because they need to "leave their mark." Levy has a staff remaining from Marks' tenure, and, given that AP does not have access to Audit Bureau of Circulation data, it doesn't seem like the mag is tanking on the newsstad; Blender isn't broken by any means. Some exponents of Old Media could do a lot worse than to evoke the irreverence of the computah world, which is what this mag has been up to for some time.

But Levy will have to come up with new editorial gimmicks, and he'll likely bring in more of "his own people," like his pal who signed up earlier this week. AP hopes, though, that the respect for artists Levy speaks of never materializes.

[Cover image via Eartodastreetz]

Clearly, the April 2008 edition of Blender denotes a transition between the stewardships of departing editor Craig Marks and incoming editor Joe Levy.

For one thing, the masthead in this issue cites no qualifier-free editor or editor in chief whatsoever: the first staffer named is Creative Director Dirk Barnett. Perhaps there were still contractual matters to be ironed out at press time.

For another, a country artist appears on Blender's cover. Your Correspondent must admit that, despite dallying with mainstream Nashville fare as a listener from time to time, he thought Taylor Swift was an American Idol personality before he read the accompanying article. Yet Blender has occasionally featured country performers prominently (Leann Rimes made the cover in 2002), whereas its competitors have long concluded that Nash Vegas and its exponents are inseparable from red-state values and must be avoided. As long as it was determined that any performer is sufficiently comely, Blender didn't discriminate. It remains to be seen whether the thoroughly blue-state-oriented Levy will continue this policy, but this feature was obviously assigned by Marks.

Jody Rosen's piece posits that Swift is a relative rarity: a young female star in a genre that emphasizes rugged men in their twenties, and whose music evidently bears some emo and hip-hop traits. Rosen succeeded in making YC curious re: Swift's music (he was particularly amused by quoted lyrics from Swift's "Picture to Burn": "So go and tell your friends I'm obsessive and crazy/ That's fine, I'll tell mine you're gay"), but did not succeed in convincing YC that the sylvan songstress is a particularly interesting individual.

Third-billed to the Swift article comes a piece by David Peisner, the fall guy for the dumb reviewing policies of Blender's sister magazine. He scribes "Meet Beatle Bob, the World's Most Obsessive Fan," the story of a renowned 55-year-old St. Louis-area man who attends live music events every night of the week, has no visible income or evidence of a home and may be afflicted by Asperger's Syndrome. Peisner presents quite a bit of vivid detail—he accompanies Bob to the house he claims is his own, only to be met by a woman at its front door who has never seen the guy before—and otherwise does an exemplary job on the sort of oddball/human interest story Marks often subsidized via images of young blonde women with pendulous dugs.

One thing both editors (and, for that matter, any other in music magazine publishing) doubtless share is the belief that cover lines teasing Nirvana content is a good idea. Hence, the band that we cannot let go of gets the "Every Original Album Reviewed" treatment. Given that Nirvana released the princely sum of four albums during its lifetime, and that its survivors authorized a bunch of naked cash grabs since 1994, YC thought this piece spectacularly cynical. But contributor Douglas Wolk at least includes the catalog of the Foo Fighters (YC is surprised that Wolk holds the decidedly prole Foos in any affection whatsoever, awarding the first record five stars) and the lone album by Krist Novoselic's Sweet 75, so the piece is redeemed ever-so-slightly.

Elsewhere, in this issue's persistent back page featurette wherein artists are queried about their on-the-spot self-portraits, "Who Does Adam Duritz Think He is?" the titular interviewee tells Music Editor Rob Tannenbaum "...if you asked my girlfriends, they would tell you, 'that boy loved to go down on me.' And I am damn good at it."

...You'll excuse YC for a moment, as he must wipe the vomit off of his monitor. Right! YC has long been mystified by the prospect of any woman allowing this vile and supremely dull creature between their legs, but he is reminded that, apart from the ancient "success = access to pussy" equation, many a porn starlet has attested to the oral virtuosity of the similarly Hedgehog-esque Ron Jeremy. And do y'all suppose that Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox ever commiserated over his technique?

Finally, YC'll note Robert Christgau's three-star review of Del the Funkee Homosapien's Eleventh Hour. He doesn't wish to heap opprobrium upon Christgau this time, but will only mention that in a late winter/early spring that features next to no big-ticket hip-hop album releases, all four of the magazines regularly assessed in this space chose to review a record in the past month by an also-ran MC that not even backpackers have any affection for. Rock critics forget an alternative rapper? Heaven forfend! Get ready for the Basehead reappraisal.

Essentially, this issue appears as if Marks' big bag of tricks has now been upended and fully excavated. Levy has probably been taking stock of which components of the magazine he wants to keep and which he wants to remove. So! Next month, then.

Your Boy's best guess is that the issue of Blender under consideration this week was about to be sent to the printer when it was announced that Joe Levy was going to leave his post as Rolling Stone's executive editor for Blender's editor-in-chief job.

YB's analysis of the dual legacies of Levy and departing Blender EIC Craig Marks was written the next day, so he did not see this interview with Levy in Adweek until it was too late. Therein, he says that you can expect Blender to be more respectful of artists than it has been previously.

This is not, frankly, good news. It's not unreasonable to suggest that Blender would often rather musical acts prance and caper monkey-style in their pages for the amusement of their readers than be treated as humans with, y'know, dignity. But it was the readers to which Blender answered, whereas "respect for artists" is really code for Rolling Stone's frequently cozy relationship with major labels and owner Jann Wenner's pals. You'd think that Levy might want to be freed of such considerations, but the above does not augur well how Blender is to be distinguished from RS going forward. We'll see...

The March 2008 edition of Blender stands as the final issue helmed by Marks. The former Spin editor and former muckety-muck of the before-its-time Inside.com launched the mag in 2001 as the savvy consigliere to Andy Pemberton, an Englishman who was not particularly attuned to American culture. After Pemberton was fired in 2004, Marks took the EIC seat. (A commenter in the above-linked Levy/Marks analysis speculated that Marks would make a move towards TV or new media projects, which would make sense, given his involvement with Inside.)

He goes out with a bang with his final issue, despite the fact that it's possible that RS put together a competing cover piece very quickly for its Feb. 21 issue in order to specifically fuck with Blender's newsstand sales. YB may be hunting for poltergeists here, seeing as Britney Spears-related content has recently been estimated to generate $120 million for the American economy every year. But Mr. Wenner is known to play hardball when his aides-de-camp dare defect to a competitor.

Both magazines bear the image of Ms. Spears, a woman who is pretty much the embodiment of Blender's raison d'etre and known to have a mutually advantageous relationship with RS when her career was functional. On Blender's cover, her face is Photoshopped onto a model's body, a crushed Red Bull can and a Mouseketeer cap full of cig butts visible below. RS's cover features a heartbreaking close-up of her face, cropped from an old file photo.

YB should disclose his agenda: He does not visit TMZ.com and perezhilton.com and is otherwise not compelled to cogitate on the daily-unfolding events of Ms. Spears' life. He does pretty much like every song he's ever heard released under her name—and he loves more than a few—and is reasonably confident that, if said life had taken another path, she could have easily been one of many southern girls who drops her flimsy garment on a nearby chair then proceeds to gyrate and bend over in front of YB's face for $20 a dance. YB will leave the psychological spelunking to the authors of the articles discussed below, and wish Ms. Spears well.

Blender's cover story on Ms. Spears, "The Road to Ruin," is very very good. Apparently, the mag had tried to do a conventional Spears piece late last fall, but given the events of the past two months, that wasn't to be. Instead, contributing writer Michael Joseph Gross pens an engrossing, deeply reported story that attempts to determine why Ms. Spears's life has immolated, compared to innumerable reports that settle for the "what" of said immolation.

Gross diligently recounts the events that have transfixed people other than YB, but he goes into great detail regarding the paparazzi that hound Spears. These "paps" (call 'em "mopes" or "thugs" if you like) are also something like her friends and confidants, often paying for her gas and fast food when she's indisposed. While Adnan Ghalib is now well known as the "pap" who has bedded Spears, Gross also goes into the shady history of Ghalib's rival, Sam Lutfi, the latest in a series of Hollywood hustlers/quasi-suitcase pimps who has appeared to be running her life and who has two restraining orders against him.

One of the "experts" swanning in to expound on the meaning of it all is Michael Hirschorn, the ex-VH1 exec behind the network's "Celebreality" programming and Marks' former boss at Inside (which probably should have been disclosed). "She got chewed up and spat out by this new celebrity culture," he says, "so it's hard not to feel some sympathy for her. She really was turned into a lab rat." Given his recent doings, Hirschorn might have mentioned something regarding his own culpability in the "new celebrity culture."

RS's piece, "The Tragedy of Britney Spears," is written by Vanessa Grigoriadis, who last fall penned a chin-stroker as to the greater meaning of the enterprise of which Idolator.com is a part. Her story is thus lighter on reportorial rigor and heavier on pop psychology than Gross'. "[Spears] is not book smart," Grigoriadis writes. "But she is intelligent enough to understand what the world wanted of her: that she was created as a virgin to be deflowered before us for our amusement and titillation. She is not ashamed of her new persona—she wants us to know what we did to her... she is enjoying the chaos she's creating."

An editor's note states that Grigoriadis spent six weeks running after Ms. Spears around L.A., so it could be that her article was conceived independent of Levy's egress. She also is granted a brief interview with Ghalib and interacts with many of the shifty hustlers who buzzard about Spears. Due to RS's later deadline, Grigoriadis covers Spears' two hospitalizations, the power struggle between Lufti and Adnan's over access to her, and her family's attempt to wrest control from the above two. Said deadline did not permit Spears' recently concluded two-week stint in UCLA Medical Center's psych ward and probably some other shit that happened while YB was writing this goddamn sentence.

Here are three factoids intended as exclusive info but present in both articles:

1. Spears had breast augmentation when she was seventeen.

2. Kevin Federline is known amongst his bros as "Meat Pole" (Gross reports that Federline called his brother after his first night with his bride-to-be, remarking "you're not going to believe whose back I broke").

3. Paris Hilton refers to Spears as "The Animal."

Ultimately, YB has to call the Battle of the Competing Definitive Britney Narratives a draw. He also wonders how many sources talked to both writers after promising "exclusivity" to each.

Otherwise, YB'll make some quick comments on the March Blender, since he thought he'd be assessing only that mag before the Feb. 21 RS showed up on the newsstand.

• Robert Smith, photographed for an "In the Studio" front-of-book piece regarding The Cure's in-progress album, looks like a portly beggar sans makeup.

• YB, no huge fan of R.E.M., is astounded that Senior Critic Jon Dolan reckons in the "Every Album Reviewed and Rated" back-catalogue feature that the band's naked ploy for grunge bucks, 1995's Monster, deserves five stars and is thus better than 1984's Reckoning and 1991's Out of Time.

• In an otherwise half-baked "the edit staff like these things" package titled "The Best List 2008," contributor Aaron Burgess crafts a March Madness-styled tournament chart to determine "the best heavy metal drummer." Beginning with post-NWoBHM beatsmen and extending to the current extreme metal movement (no Ian Paice and Tommy Lee, sadly), Meshuggah's Tomas Haake prevails over Slayer's Dave Lombardo. Burgess is allowed to use musicianly jargon therein, nominally a Blender no-no.

• Finally, Robert Christgau, the author of a recent RS review that YB noted seemed edited into tortured blandness, now appears in Blender's masthead as Dolan's co-Senior Critic. It seems that the Dean has already followed his onetime apprentice Levy over to Blender, possibly leaving RS's hypothetical copyeditor with no editorial mandate along the lines of "we know this guy indignantly refuses to turn in clear, readable copy, but he's the dean of rock criticism, so you, me and the rest of the staff have to grant him deference available to no one else."

Here's the long-rumored Blender cover featuring "Britney Spears," or rather a composite thereof; the cover accompanies a lengthy, depressing story covering her current career as a paparazzi object/wreck, one that's probably best summed up by the line "Disasters, not music, have become her product." You do have to wonder, though, if future issues of Blender will include such full disclosure about the photo-manipulation running wild within its pages! At the very least, they could provide a back-of-the-issue tutorial on how to use Photoshop to make subjects' abs glisten in just the right way.

Britney Spears: The Road To Ruin [Blender]
Earlier: Britney Spears To Return To Her Cover-Girl Heights Again (Sorta)
[Image via Blender]

Hey kids! Roll on up for Keyboard Krybaby's Kremlinology Korner!

KK certainly did not see yesterday's news regarding Rolling Stone executive editor Joe Levy's egress to Blender coming. But watch as he flails about, trying to make the scenario of a former Rolling Stone bigwig poaching the mag's main music dude kompelling!

Much is often made of the mercurial managerial tendencies of Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone's editor and founder. But for the past decade or so, the magazine's braintrust w/r/t music coverage has been remarkably stable. Levy replaced Mark Kemp as executive editor in 1996, and since then he has served as RS's frontman: whenever major/old media came calling for a quote or two regarding Napster/OiNK, a recently deceased musical figure, Britney Spears' vagina, etc., etc., Levy was there. He's familiar to a vast majority of viewers of VH1 talking-head programs as a reliably smug commentator. Then there are the few—the proud!—who knew him as the "Tim Gunn" of MTV's I'm From Rolling Stone.

Before all that, Levy worked at Details, and he was the music editor for the Village Voice in the early '90s. The latter position at the time amounted to being Robin to Robert Christgau's Batman. KK recalls (somewhat dimly) that Levy was capable of some good, non-shill-y scribing, and it's on the strength of his VV gig that he's held in high regard by the rock critic intelligentsia—or at least the pre-Pitchfork, pre-bloggy-woggy iteration.

At the same time, Levy often affects a somewhat preening posture, which stands him in good stead when dealing with the bigwigs of the music industry—or what remains of it. Part of this can be explained by the simple fact that he's been RS's chief liaison to the biz for so long, but the other part is that, as far as certain kinds of bizzers go, game recognizes game.

As cushy as Levy's job may have seemed, 12 years of supervising RS's music content might have become old: KK would guess that the stress of closing every two weeks would lose against Blender's more leisurely production schedule. (KK has absolutely no idea what sort of $$$ is entailed.) In any case, Levy must have had a good working relationship with Kent Brownridge, who spent 31 years as the Dick Cheney-style general manager for Wenner Media and is now, as the CEO of Alpha Media Group, the overlord of Blender and Maxim.

KK wonders, though, whether two of Levy's guys—Roberts Sheffield and Christgau—will follow. Both are very likely contract writers for Rolling Stone: if said contracts exist but are concluding, Sheffield would obviously be an easier fit for Blender than Christgau, whose stylings have been defiantly challenging in both Blender and RS respectively.

And now a few words regarding Craig Marks, the fellow whom Levy is replacing. KK has mentioned Marks' background before: While he's a much more discreet and more calculating character than Levy, he's well-known for his friendships with alt-rock elders like Courtney Love and Eddie Vedder, and is similarly respected by bizzers and the rock-crit front rank.

But while Levy has held the fort down at the dominant music magazine for more then a decade, Marks' achievement at Blender is singular. You may like Blender, or you may not. But in 2001, when the mag launched, the publishing landscape seemed hostile to a new general-interest music magazine, even one proffered by the then-ascendant Dennis Publishing; anyone could see that the meltdown now enveloping both the mainstream music business and the publishing business would proceed apace. But Blender succeeded, and it did so by embracing music culture as it exists in the present, and not something that suffers in comparison to its 1967 equivalent. Being that Blender is Maxim's sister publication, it uses humor and the suggestion of boobies to finance that conceit. This, in KK's estimation, is an honorable pursuit, and one that is wholly due to the canny machinations of the supremely talented Marks.

To put it another way: Perhaps Levy tired of Wenner's boomer-centric meddling and wanted to run a successful magazine that unambiguously celebrated the present moment. Now he will, and he has Marks to thank for that. It's almost certain that Marks will be up for Levy's old job.

[Photo: WireImage]

New York, NY (January 9, 2008) — Alpha Media Group Inc. CEO Kent Brownridge today announced the appointment of Joe Levy to Editor-in-Chief of Blender, the award-winning music magazine. Levy will oversee the editorial strategy and direction of Blender. He joins Ben Madden who was named Publisher in December.

Levy joins Blender from Rolling Stone where he most recently served as Executive Editor. For the past ten years, Levy helped define the editorial direction of Rolling Stone, steered the magazine's music coverage, edited features and cover stories, and supervised special issues such as Rolling Stone's 1000th issue and the RS 500, the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Prior to Rolling Stone, Levy was a senior editor at Details and an editor at the Village Voice and Spin. He taught at NYU's Clive Davis School of Recorded Music as an adjunct professor and is the co-editor of The Rolling Stone Interviews (Back Bay Books).

Kent Brownridge, CEO of Alpha Media Group Inc. said, "Joe is the Dean of today's music magazine editors—he is well known among his peers in the music industry, and beyond, for his passion and professionalism and I am thrilled to welcome him."

Levy graduated from Yale University with distinction. He and his wife reside in New York City.

Blender [Official site]
[Photo: MTV]

So, y'all tell KK: what is it with year-end wrap ups? Not just with respect to music magazines, but to top-ten lists compiled by rock critics, blog denizens, and possibly your human resources coordinator and mailman? What, precisely, accounts for the human tendency to quantify music, films and TV shows based upon their appearance during a calendar year? Unlike many folks of his acquaintance, KK lacks the compulsion to prioritize cultural artifacts along such clearly demarcated lines.

While you chew on that (and feel free to leave comments below to that end), your very own Keyboard Krybaby assesses the catch-all 2007 issues of the three magazines regularly considered in this space—the January Spin, the January/February Blender, and the Dec. 27-Jan. 10 Rolling Stone—all of which hit newsstands in the past week and a half. KK can say that the reason these publications, and many many other mags and computah destinations, concoct "best of 2007" lists and make sport with the celebrity mishaps occurring in the space of year are twofold: 1. To do so is easy; 2. People who ain't KK enjoy reading such things.

Given lead time constraints, Spin and Blender were certainly cooking up these issues more than a month and half ago. The Blender under consideration reviews an Oct. 30 Van Halen show and a Oct. 14 Kelly Clarkson concert; Spin includes a shot of Eddie Van Halen in midair leap from Sept. 27 and a review of the Sex Pistols' performance at the Guitar Hero III release party on Oct. 25. Which is to say that editorial judgments as to what was important in 2007 had to have been made when there were more than two months left in 2007. This RS issue, on the other hand, closed two weeks ago, having acknowledged both the widespread layoffs at a couple of major labels and Grammy nominations around that time.

But whatever the lead time issues might be, certain memes arise. KK withholds comment on each mag's "best of 2007" lists, not only due's to KK's own disinclination, but also since Idolator's curators have covered "the top this or that" beat with the same fervor that The Wall Street Journal has been devoting to the subprime mortgage crisis. To wit:

"The cover represents what we're all about, man.": Blender's cover features a pop singer removing her shirt; RS' year-end cover is, as always, a composite of many of its 2007 covers—which is to say, the magazine itself and imprimatur it bestows; and Spin has a rare instance of a African-American cover subject thereupon, one who this year scored covers for all four publications regularly discussed here and who looks to have been Photoshopped in with the men whose recording he mined for his calling-card single (Daft Punk appear to have interacted very little with interviewer Andrew Vontz in an "Entertainers of the Year" story, but it's all very high concept).

"Time to turn into Best Week Ever": Each mag tackles 2007's signal watercooler topics relevant to its demographic in a section devoted to charticles and quippy items regarding the misdeeds of Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears, among others (one wonders if Blender's rumored upcoming Britney cover is risked due to the sport it makes with Spears herein). But as of Wednesday, it's very likely that the staffers involved with each package are contemplating the limits of the lead time constraints mentioned above—doubtless l'affaire Jamie Lynn is the One That Got Away.

"B-b-b-but her publicist said we had the exclusive": Spin anoints Feist as "Breakout of the Year"; Blender dubs her "Breakthrough of the Year." While both Spin research editor Phoebe Reilly and Blender senior editor Josh Eells note that Paul Simon is aware that Leslie Feist exists, Reilly's piece reveals that Fran Drescher does as well, leaving Eells to disclose that she was handpicked to perform on Saturday Night Live by Brian Williams.

"Sorry, Mr. Ford ad rep, the whole fold-out ad supplement thing hasn't been working out so hot for us... wait, how much?": The Ford Motor Company sponsors a foldout presenting Rolling Stone's 100 Best Songs of the Year; the accompanying ad pimps the auto leviathan's Sync doohickey, which provides voice activation for MP3 players in cars. Similarly, Ford/Sync also presents Blender's 2008 Rock and Roll User's Guide, in which upcoming album releases are cited via artist categories: Weezer and Metallica are "Rock Studs," Big Boi and Usher are "Big Macks," and, to Blender's considerable credit, Madonna and Janet Jackson are "Cougars," KK's favorite recent appellation and one he does not recall reading in a mass-market publication until now.

"We are brought unto this world with nothing, and with nothing we depart": Blender and Spin do not bother with them what passed this year. RS does, and gives pride of placement to a Michelle Phillips-penned reminiscence of Denny Doherty, the least notable member of the pretty much suck-ass Mamas and the Papas. Jazz drummer Max Roach gets the half-page encomium from ?uestlove he deserves, while country music patriarch Porter Waggoner gets an insufficient 11-word passing mention. The issue's deadline, however, did not permit the mag to note the death of Ike Turner.

"Mustn't have anyone think we're going through the motions": Each mag includes a couple of pieces that emphasize their respective strengths:

• RS' front-of-book Rock and Roll section includes a story on the scourge of compression, in which the dynamics of most major label pop and rock recordings of the past 15 years were rendered undynamic in order to appeal to MP3-trained ears. While "The Death of High Fidelity" plays into RS' "everything wuz better years ago" meme, writer Robert Levine does a fine job shining a light on an underreported phenomenon, while noting the related issue of how Pro Tools tends to camouflage shitty musicianship. Oddly, contributing editor Rob Sheffield's "Still Hair Metal After All These Years," a report on July's Rocklahoma festival, probably should have been published in August. Perhaps it was sitting around until someone noticed that the death of Quiet Riot singer Kevin DuBrow last month made the piece timely. In any case, Sheffield is a lot easier to take when he has several thousand words in which to make some points: one could conclude that "compression" has a deleterious effect on his prose.

• KK was irritated by a question Blender music editor Rob Tannenbaum posed to Miranda Lambert some months ago, but KK believes that, as a music journalism all-rounder, Tannenbaum bows to no one. His cover profile of Stacy Ferguson, Blender's "Woman of the Year," manages to make the interviewee, a woman that previously interested KK not one scintilla, seem like good company. He not only coaxes her into admitting that she did indeed piss herself onstage last year (which KK believes is a quasi-scoop), but turns phrase after phrase after phrase. This is how it's done, budding ink-stained wretches! Additionally, frequent contributor Jody Rosen examines the genesis of the mag's reader-elected song of the year, Rihanna's "Umbrella." Rosen details the creative process for a magazine that most often concludes that its readers are less interested in the "creative process" than they are in engaging in a pursuit that tends to make Blender's pages stick together.

• As for Spin, "The October Surprise" finds contributor David Peisner analysing the ongoing self-immolation of the "recording arts" components of various multinationals, and how Radiohead, Madonna and Trent Reznor are jumping ship and thus demonstrating how artists can now take control of heir livelihoods. KK will only add that 20 years ago many folks inveighed against the business practices of major labels, and said self-immolation is precisely what those folks desired.

THE GOOD: This list is a near-perfect execution of the Blender-patented blend of mainstream music (Brad Paisley, Jay-Z, Amy Winehouse), just-outside-the-mainstream music (Spoon, Okkervil River), and hot babes (Rihanna, Feist, Miranda Lambert).
THE BAD: I can think of about 10 albums that came out last month that are more interesting than Band Of Horses' Cease To Begin. Just... no.
THE WHAAAA? For an album that just came out last Tuesday, The Dream's Lovehate sure made an impact! It's No. 7, just behind In Rainbows.

25. Rihanna, Good Girl Gone Bad
24. Bright Eyes, Cassadaga
23. Lily Allen, Alright, Still...
22. Band Of Horses, Cease To Begin
21. Okkervil River, The Stage Names
20. Brad Paisley, 5th Gear
19. Modest Mouse, We Were Dead Before The Ship Sank
18. Justice, †
17. Bruce Springsteen, Magic
16. Jay-Z, American Gangster
15. Alison Krauss & Robert Plant, Raising Sand
14. The White Stripes, Icky Thump
13. Feist, The Reminder
12. Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
11. LCD Soundsystem, Sound Of Silver
10. Rilo Kiley, Under The Blacklight
9. Miranda Lambert, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
8. Amy Winehouse, Back To Black
7. The Dream, Lovehate
6. Radiohead, In Rainbows
5. Against Me!, New Wave
4. Kanye West, Graduation
3. Lil Wayne, The Carter 3 Sessions
2. Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
1. M.I.A., Kala

Blender [Official site]

Your Boy is going to out on a limb and guess that the respective bigwigs at Blender and Rolling Stone have not been entirely pleased with one another in recent weeks.

Generally speaking, entertainment magazine higher-ups do not much like it when one of their competitors puts a celebrity on their mag's cover at the same time that they do. Lo and behold: both Blender and RS hit the street last week with cover images depicting Jay-Z sporting a bespoke suit in front of a white background.

YB's guess is that Blender's staff noted months ago that Z's second post-"retirement" album was to be tied into this year's big-budget guns-and-drugs blowout film American Gangster, and thus set up an interview and photo shoot with Jay. Whereas possibly less than a month ago Rolling Stone concluded that that both Gangster the movie and Gangster the album were sure to top their respective charts, so the staff flipped a switch and slapped its own cover package together.

It wouldn't strain credulity to suggest that this is Wenner Media's way of telling prodigal senior VP/general manager and current chairman/CEO of Blender's new publisher Alpha Media Group Kent Brownridge that they can fuck with his newsstand sales any goddamn time they want, would it? It's much harder to imagine Mr. Z being much worried about playing both sides of the field than it is to picture him lying back with his feet up on his desk, the knowledge that less affluent pop stars than he risk much by flouting the very notion of "exclusivity" briefly crossing his mind before he decides whether he'd rather purchase a villa in Tuscany or on the Riviera.

In any case, contributor Chris Norris' Q&A with Jay, "Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangster," is not particularly revealing: it suggests that their sitdown lasted no more than a half hour and didn't rouse the interviewee's interest. Norris has a much more fun time following one Heidi Montag around and documenting her asininity in another profile. (YB was only dimly aware of The Hills before reading Norris' story, so he watched the program the night before writing this. He can say that the chasm separating his interests from those of the demographic MTV caters to has never been more profound.) Norris not only has great sport with this pneumatic ninny but with Blender's raison d'étre itself: she begins "work on her debut album in February. 'It will kind of be like Pussycat Dolls, Britney Spears and Fergie,' she has promised fans. Thus has Blender come calling."

Back in June, YB wondered why Blender sat by and watched as its competitors went to town on Amy Winehouse. A few months later, the mag dispatched contributor Jody Rosen to London for "Chasing Amy," a story that Winehouse's minders probably intended as the big "she's got herself together" story. But Winehouse falls asleep at the beginning of each of the two interviews Rosen was granted, although a story depicting the singer as alert and thoughtful would have been far less appealing to Blender's editors.

Moving on to "The Guide": Senior critic Jon Dolan assesses Radiohead's In Rainbows, and the record is awarded four stars as Dolan employs more Blender-style snark than he normally does; second-billed is "Sore Winners," contributor RJ Smith's two-star review of the Eagles' Long Road Out of Eden. YB is fascinated with Henley and Co., so he may be somewhat biased when he opines that Smith's assessment is fucking great. It is, however, more likely due to the the simple fact that Smith sharp-shoots what kind of person Henley appears to be in the review's lede. To wit:

Every office has one. The guy whose cubicle you quickstep past, to avoid his opinions: Television is debasing our culture. People don't recycle. Politicians lie. Let's call this guy Henley. He'll tell you and tell you, and tomorrow he'll tell you again.

He then goes on to detail how Henley's finger-wagging dominates the record, and how it subtly suggests that, 30 years after he had his fun, no one else should be allowed any indulgences.

Smith, an old hand at the rock crit game, has written for LA Weekly and for that matter has written about the Eagles for Blender before. In that passage, he does something that YB wishes he'd see much more often in arts criticism: he makes the correct assumption that his reader knows the basic facts of the band's history, and spends his time making a useful point about the band's motives and how they affect what that band does.

This template could have been used for Erik Davis' review of the new Led Zeppelin compilation Mothership, but Davis insists on recounting vintage Zep lore at a time when any kid can access said stories via the Device You Are Currently Gazing At, and thus doesn't have much in the way of fresh insight. He only makes passing mention that this is the second time in a decade that the band's hits have been repackaged, and makes none at all that LZ scheduled a reunion gig at the end of the year—it was announced on Sept. 12, well before Davis' deadline.

Finally, YB notices that Blender's editors either do not think the Hives new album will sell terribly well or are not very interested in said Swedes, since the band is slotted into the "Useful Tips From The Stars" front-of-book ghetto, where they detail how to ride a bike in the city. Unlike Spin, which included a profile of the band in its November issue, Blender feels no longing for the halcyon days of 2002, when definite article-favoring bands received hosannas for bringing back "real rock."

"The 100 Greatest Indie-Rock Albums Ever"? Hot damn! Are your WordPress accounts ready to rumble? Not being the type of people who wait for Christmas morning to dig into our plum pudding, we went looking for the list online, and found this, a Russian LiveJournal that claims (from what our limited Babelfish skills can tell) to have it. But this can't really be it, with De La Soul at No. 14 and the Shaggs at No. 100, can it? This is clearly some sort of Russian disinformation. Sadly, whatever the final tally, we're informed the list was not compiled by "The Hills' Superhot Supervillain" Heidi Montag. But we can dream.

UPDATE: It's real.

Blender: 100 лучших инди-роковых альбома всех времен [LiveJournal]
[Blender cover via Crunk + Disorderly]

Somebody who should know once said something along the following lines in Your Correspondent's presence, regarding how to get the newsstand attention of young men: "In the late spring and summertime, they can see all the tits and ass they want on the street. In the fall and winter, they can't, and that's when you put nearly nekkid chicks on the cover."

So—despite the unseasonable warmth around the country and after covers featuring Andy Samberg, Kanye West and Jack White (relatively chaste images of Kelly Clarkson and Meg White don't count)—comes the November Blender. Here we have Nicole Scherzinger, her raven locks, her remarkable S-curve, the top of her two pert buttocks and a discreet hint of the space between.

YC enjoys current pop music very much, but somehow the Pussycat Dolls' singles have not managed to penetrate his purview. He will say that it's funny that "burlesque shows" are sold as a high concept, acceptable-for-female-patrons iteration of a titty bar, and that he was amused that a pop music version of same was being marketed to young girls as "empowering." So he was curious if Scherzinger would be represented as a fairly interesting person in Blender's telling.

In fact, she is not. But, like other cover story protagonists discussed in this space, it's not in her interest to say anything thoughtful or revealing to a journalist. Instead, she indulges in "this album is my one shot for the big time and I don't want to blow it" boilerplate, refers to herself in the third person, and winkingly denies that the imagery in her videos is overtly sexualized. To his credit, writer Michael Joseph Gross does a fine job with the same kind of quasi-writearound that he authored for Avril Lavigne, writing vividly on her efforts to "pledge the empyrean sorority" and interviewing her svengalis. He catches Interscope honcho Jimmy Iovine nearly admitting that marketing Scherzinger is challenging since her ethnicity is hard to pin down, or "you can't tell what the hell she..." The word Iovine stopped himself from saying is, ahem, "is."

Alright, so they've made their bid for the attention of backwards baseball-cap wearers, but it'll be some time before new boss Kent Brownridge will be able to gauge the effectiveness of Blender's first newsstand gambit under the stewardship of his Alpha Media Group. However, one trick, directed towards the national media and bloggers, worked straight out of the gate: "The 40 Worst Lyricists in Rock" list was picked up all over the damn place a week before most issues hit the stands.

Blender is an old hand at the list game. The calculus is simple: picking "the worst" of anything is arguably more newsworthy than picking "the best"; the casual music fan will always understand how the English language works better than they understand how music is put together (which is to say, not at all, which goes for most rock critics as well); and awarding Sting top honors is an easy way for Blender to draw a line in the sand between it and Sting-BFF Rolling Stone. The entire exercise is pretty amusing and well-written, and so, since your boy believes that nitpicking lists is pretty pointless, he'll just say that hating on prog-rock, as this list does overwhelmingly, is the hoariest rock crit cliché known to man. Neil Peart, Sting's runner-up, is the Lil' Wayne of virtuostic, ex-Objectivist Canadian drummers, and that's all there is to it.

Moving on to the front-of-book Burner section: It leads with a picture of Pete Doherty and his cat, to whom he apparently has been feeding crack cocaine. YC can hardly suggest that it is only Blender that persists in highlighting the various misdeeds perpetrated by this miserable creature, as well as Amy Winehouse: so does nearly every media outlet in Christendom. But other items in the section concern minor hijinx relating to Supergrass, Madness, Lily Allen, and Morrissey. The effect is that it seems that British rock writers, with their NME-bred myopia regarding native pop figures, have an outsize influence at Blender some three years after its former editor in chief, their countryman, left the mag. But beyond a few Anglophiles, it doesn't seem like Americans are particularly interested in the minutiae of English pop musicians. In any case, YC finds himself thinking that every piece in Burner should be like the recurring "You Rock" and "When Will Your Favorite Pop Star Croak" featurettes, and that it should leave straight reportage of wacky shit to the kind of outlets that flourish via the Device You Are Currently Gazing At.

So we come to the Guide, and like clockwork, here's a four-star appraisal of Springsteen's Magic in the marquee spot. While Senior Critic Jon Dolan approves of the record, he calls the record "frustratingly myth-happy" and "a little behind the times," which would seem to disqualify the assigned rating. If Blender doesn't observe the "thou shalt not speak ill of the Boss" commandment obeyed by Rolling Stone and every American newspaper, there's still some dissonance between Dolan's words and the mag's rating.

As there is for a review of Avenged Sevenfold's new self-titled album, penned by British critic Simon Reynolds. He's known for a number of things, among them coining the terms "electronica" and "post-rock," writing several theory-drenched books, and consenting to appear in a clip wherein he and his wife, Joy Press, congratulate themselves on their adventures in bohemian parenting. One thing he is not known for is his fondness for heavy metal: in various posts on his personal blog, he writes of the disdain he felt growing up as a post-punker towards the rather more downmarket devotees of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Earlier this year, he noted "hipster-metal" with approval, since acts like Sunn O))) are influenced by the experimental/electronic music he favors.

Toward the conclusion of his review of Avenged Sevenfold, he mentions that the song "Critical Acclaim" baits liberals and in doing so "upholds (metal's) legacy of conservative politics." This, frankly, is utter dog shit. As a musical genre, heavy metal is too huge to be tarred as such: If any political content is articulated, it tends toward indiscriminate anti-authoritarianism and antagonizing religious authority. But here Reynolds—and possibly the editor who let him get away with such a condescending and factually incorrect slur—tells us more about himself than he does about the band or the record. In any case, he doesn't like the album (it is, after all, the kind of music metalheads like these days), but it's still awarded three stars and is second-billed to Magic. YC would understand awarding that amount of space to a take down of a much-anticipated album by an artist everyone is aware of, but only metalheads have heard of AS. Huh!

The Guide editor should have sent Reynolds a draft of Dolan's three and a half star review of The Metal Box, which comprises genre highlights from the late '60s to the early '90s. Dolan may not have been a metal fan in the '70s and '80s, but he understands its codes, is amused by its frequent absurdity and seems to, y'know, like some of the bands therein. He certainly is not blinkered by decades-old class bias (then again, Americans have a much easier time escaping ancient class distinctions than English people do). YC should also note that a review of The Brit Box, a similarly wide-ranging collection of non-metal music from the British Isles from the early '80s to the '90s, is penned not by an English writer, but by one Jim Barber, who is probably the onetime manager/boyfriend of Courtney Love who has that name.

Blender is more confident than its competitors—or it at least succeeds in evincing confidence, which is just as important. So why it continues (as many American publications do) to let British stringers run around unchecked is very odd indeed.

In 2007, and somehow I doubt I'm the first person to actually make this comparison, the online chatter/message board/blog complaint cycle whenever any publication posts a best/worst list has become the rock critical version of a lot of frustrated people getting their hands on cheap porno, easy fodder for complaining, especially for those can't get it together to actually have their own opinions or (even more sadly) those who take the downright lazy, possibly-not-even-sincere opinions of others as a minor affront, the kind of content that lives or dies on the merits of how funny and/or insightful the writing is, while being so culuturally debased that you as a writer occasionally need to check yourself that you're still, you know, writing cheap porno. Which is probably when you just say "fuck it, it's a paycheck," and wind up with the slack, distracted writing and sad recieved-wisdom of Blender's list of "The 10 Most Overpraised Records Ever", the kind of list that would barely qualify as Girls Gone Wild, one of those late-night last-resorts that feels even more shameful for how lame it is:

Tom Waits's later-day output:
Whereas critics once kindly described his plaintive, atonal yowls as "gravelly," they haven't acknowledged what's obvious to anyone without nerve damage in or around his eardrum: that Waits's vocals now sound like moderately well-enunciated barfing. He may be one of the most unique performers on this or any other planet, but it's getting increasingly difficult to classify his output as "music."

Not enough lazy, unchecked assumptions dangerously mixed with a terminal quantitiy of snappy zingers for you? Well how's about:

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, The Sex Pistols:
You're ugly! God is dead! Jesus is a leprechaun! The queen has a penis! We hate everything! Blah blah blah blah blah blah! Blah! Blah!

Which is hanging onto to "critique" with its fingernails and exclamation points. I guess you can see why this was left to languish online, while the big dogs at Blender prepare their list of the "40 Worst Lyricists" for the next print issue. (Sting at No. 1!) Well don't worry, junior pornographer Larry Dobrow. Keep at it and some day you may be called up to do the best/worst thing alongside the major league panderers in the magazine itself. Really work hard and, this being America and all, you could make it all the way to the top: programming director at VH1.

The 10 Most Overpraised Records Ever [Blender]

*The extended metaphors in this post were brought to you by Catholic guilt and Major League Baseball.

**Please don't think this frustrated rant (full of ironic contradictions) against the slipping relevance of long-form criticism in a blurb and listicle world will eventually preclude us from shamelessly posting Idolator's Top 100 Worst Songs Of The 1990s, where we'll gently mock you (and ourselves, of course, that's implicit) for once loving Goldfinger in order to make our rent that month.

This week marks the third out of the last four that finds Your Correspondent assessing a music magazine boasting a cover image of a guy who any reader of Idolator—or a consumer of any other media outlet nominally invested in popular music—would be forgiven for being very very tired of.

Rolling Stone, Paste, XXL and probably a bunch of other mags went with covers of Kanye West in the weeks and months leading up to last week's release of Graduation. While the October Blender may seem timely, hitting newsstands a few days before West became the newly minted best-selling recording artist in the U.S., YC wonders if the mag's editorial star chamber is a bit chafed at having its marquee feature, "Way Out West," appear so late in the game.

They shouldn't, if just for the fact that Blender's West story contains the most ingenious and most ably set-up punchline that YC expects to read in any magazine article—or in any piece of entertainment journalism—this year.

Like many competing profiles, the story notes West's fondness for music that isn't hip-hop or R & B: he samples Daft Punk and Thom Yorke; likes the Killers, Modest Mouse, and Keane; notes that VH1 hipped him to Regina Spektor, Feist, and All-American Rejects; collaborates with Peter Bjorn & John and Chris Martin; commissioned an alternate video of his "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" from Zach Galifianakis and Will Oldham; and remixes Fall Out Boy.

Blender's inference? "Maybe it's Kanye West that doesn't care about black people."

WHAP!!!! POW!!!!!! WATCH THAT MUFUGGER SAIL OUT OF THE BALLPARK!!!!! IMAGINE WEST'S PUBLICIST'S NECK VEINS SWELLING WITH RAGE AS THEY PLOT VENGEANCE AGAINST BLENDER!!!!

YC feels awfully thick! Why couldn't he have come up with that bon mot when he noted in past weeks that editors and writers for white people-centric magazines are besotted with West's interest in blog-rawk? But he didn't—either writer Jody Rosen or a Blender editor did. Whoever it was earned their paycheck this month, and for whatever it could possibly matter, receives YC's commendation.

In any case, Rosen is a fine writer who wrote a book about "White Christmas" and is currently the music critic for Slate; he also writes frequently about music for The Nation, a "strange bedfellows" gig that's right up there with a position that YC applied for a few years ago: bridge columnist for Guns and Ammo. Rosen follows West around during July's Live Earth event, but doesn't get West to say anything much different than what he has said to any other outlet recently. No matter: It's all in Rosen's lively prose, astute observations, and proximity, such as watching West try out rhymes for his cameo with the Police and John Mayer. As any fule kno who saw the broadcast, West's rhymes were terrible, and Rosen diplomatically describes them as "not exactly the kind of freestyle liable to strike fear into the heart of Lil' Wayne."

Immediately following in the feature well is an excellent profile of the exceptional and exceptionally odd Finnish "love-metal" quintet HIM. Apart from the metal/goth/butt-rock press, the band has been ignored by the mainstream music mags, so Senior Critic Jon Dolan's story is particularly welcome. Dolan mentions that frontman Ville Valo was voted as the 13th-greatest Finn in a list of the Top 100 Finns of All Time a few years ago: YC isn't sure what to think of a list of top Finns that doesn't include this man.

Then, in Senior Editor Josh Eells' "So You Think You Can Sing," Blender maintains its unending interest in All Things American Idol. Therein, young kids are depicted going to a Massachusetts camp run by the Idol organization, where they sing all day and spend time with marginal Idol figures. It's a good story, with plenty of color (many of these kids have the same "Oh, there's no question I'm gonna be famous" self-confidence that marked that guy with the huge blond/black frightwig in The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years), but YC wonders if Blender overestimates the interest in year-round Idol coverage on the part of its readership, which is largely 20-to-30something males (there's also a FOB "Collect Call" featurette from that nice Daughtry fellow).

The issue also contains instances of what very likely happens when Blender's staff members feel like they have to cover artists whose music will sell pretty well, but who don't interest them all that much—which is to say, artists who have next to no known drug/sex foibles, aren't arrogant and aren't known to misbehave. Hence, the Starbucks/hausfrau-approved KT Tunstall is slotted into the "How To..." featurette in the FOB, a space often designated for artists that Blender is obliged to cover, likely due to horse-trading with record labels. (Tunstall shows us how to live in a tree.) Same goes for Plain White T's, the boringly dubbed quintet behind the very dull hit "Hey There Delilah": the dudes participate in a fashion shoot and relate their snoozy history to Associate Editor Mark Yarm.

Now quickly, Robin, to the reviews section! We haven't a moment to lose!

Jon Pareles, moonlighting from his chief pop critic gig at the New York Times, pens the section-leading double review of new records from the 50 and Kanye of freak-folk, and he gives Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam four stars and Devendra Banhart's Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon three. Oddly, Pareles' review of the latter is dismissive and far less generous then the rating would warrant (he also doesn't mention that Banhart, whom YC abhors, has become semi-famous for what amounts to a by-the-book, adding-nothing-at-all Donovan homage). This suggests that Blender's institutional opinion of the record, reflected by the rating, is not the same as that of Pareles. He also authors an overview of every album made by Genesis: YC likes both the Gabriel and Collins-fronted iterations of the band quite a bit, but is amused that Pareles believes that 1986's abominable Invisible Touch is as "essential" as 1973's prog opus Selling England By the Pound and better than 1981's prog-pop Abacab. Oh well!

YC will conclude with a few words regarding "Rock's Greatest Dynasty," one of Blender's March Madness-style competitions wherein the result of the "greatest" this or that is whittled down via statistics, some of which are valid, some of which are fanciful and arbitrary. Oddly, this installment, in which musical families are pitted against one another, largely forgoes stats. The result is that the Jacksons prevail over the Beach Boys' Wilson clan as the most musically significant and most bizarre family in pop music history. You might think that Blender picking the Jacksons and the Wilsons is a bit boomer-ific. Then you might remember that, were Rolling Stone to do the same kind of exercise, the victors would be either the Lennons or the Dylans.

Before Your Correspondent does his "embittered hack sneers, huffs and puffs over a music magazine" song and dance, he would like to quickly note the pageview counts of his last two columns.

The first pertained to an issue of Vibe boasting an individual with a fighting chance of being the leader of the free world (YC also wrongly thought asking readers to guess what the signature issues for the 2008 election for music magazines, Web sites, and blogs might be would be surefire comment chum). The pageview count has hardly budged over 700 since it went up two weeks ago. The following column went over an issue of Rolling Stone, featuring the star of the biggest tween-oriented franchise since Harry Potter, and the pageview count went crazy-go-nuts (it's now pushing 4000) almost from the git-go, seeing as it went up on the eve of High School Musical 2's Disney Channel debut.

So what can we infer from this? That kids went bananas with the Google alerting last weekend? That music-blog visitors live in a rabbit hole (some Pitchfork writers certainly seem to) and would only care about Sen. Obama if he evinced an interest in Takka Takka? That those same visitors don't care about Vibe? That a Spin rundown will do well because those visitors will click on anything bearing an image of Interpol?

Well, let's try a little experiment...

The Arcade Fire would be a lot less dull if they used certain tools—such as bridges, modulations and middle eights—that songwriters have availed themselves of for generations, instead of hammering the old "let's build up into a huge crescendo" trick into the ground.

Now, once more into the Blender breach!

One thing that accounted for Blender's big splash in 2001-2002 was the way the editorial staff knew how people luv lists. Granted, Rolling Stone, Spin, and many other entertainment mags had been presenting lists for a long time, but they tended to be premised on the "best" this, or the "greatest" that. But Blender comes along with Top 50 Worst Songs Ever," or "The 50 Worst Things to Ever Happen to Music." For the most part ingeniously counterintuitive and idiosyncratic, Blender's lists are the best "read it while you squeeze a coil" accoutrements imaginable.

For the September issue, Blender presents its "Hot Report 2007." Why the mag continues to tether its annual marquee "we think these things are great" compendium to the shopworn concept of "hot" is curious. After all, arch-rival Rolling Stone has presented its Hot List each spring for 21 years now; maybe Blender wanted to go with something else, until focus groups and market research rendered the ironclad verdict that "hot" works well on the newsstand. Thus the "Hot Report," while written in the mag's breezily amused but still authoritative manner, is of the "Fall Preview" variety common to every magazine in the history of everything.

Anyway, this issue's cover subject and "No. 1 in hotness" is Andy Samberg, the SNL dude who inadvertently provi