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Posts Tagged “burning questions”

Did Your Local Music Retailer Break Street Date In Axl's Honor? From the comments on our Chinese Democracy timeline: "Did everyone bump their release date up to today to combat Axl? B/c our local target had all of the week's new releases out today and we picked up the Killers and Kanye. I was thinking those were Monday and Tuesday respectively though..." Anyone notice anything? The Best Buy I went to didn't seem to have any other Monday releases on the shelves, but then again, finding the Chinese Democracy display was enough of a slog... [A look at this week's releases]

burning questions

"Marmite Artists" Make Everyone Pucker Their Lips And Get In The Mood For A Row

Supermarket shelves in other parts of the world (and at certain specialty shops in the US) contain a food product called Marmite, which is basically a bread spread made out of yeast extract. I personally tried it when I was 16, after an Australian pen pal sent me a few packets, and my Cool Ranch and Domino's-trained palate found it absolutely repellent; I haven't tried it since, because the thought of doing so makes me shiver. But apparently it's pretty divisive in the UK, to the point that the product name is actually being used by some music-biz insiders to describe certain artists who have a love-'em-or-hate-'em appeal. The musical omnivores at Popjustice explain: "the phrase describes the sort of band or artist which divides opinion as strongly as the disgusting/delicious yeasty food product Marmite. It is not a phrase used to describe how good or bad something is—there's no value judgment involved." Popjustice says that Alphabeat, the Scissor Sisters, and Bob Dylan are all "Marmite artists"—although a shitty band being pushed by a publicist to no avail is not, so don't try it next time, publicists. Confused yet? Well, in keeping with our English-class form, the term is used in context after the jump! More »

burning questions

Musical Ignorance: Something Way Too Many People Are Proud Of These Days

Carrie Brownstein's blog Monitor Mix is generally interesting, but something about yesterday's discussion about critically acclaimed artists people aren't really familiar with rubbed the music fan in me the wrong way. Not because of Brownstein, but because of her readers; something about comment-section types bragging that they'd never heard Led Zeppelin or David Bowie seems deeply, deeply wrong. More »

burning questions

Whose Hype Machine Is It Anyway?

Today sees a good, intense salvo from Ronan Fitzgerald, the Irish techno DJ and critic recently relocated to London (and, yes, a friend), about the nature of hype. As in, how anyone who complains about it is pretty much kidding themselves: "Hype is not created by some shadowed Illuminati behind the castle walls. Hype in the post-Internet age is you, me, and everybody else. We are the hype. People attacking hype are just more hype. Hype seems to have become a cheap way of referring to information overload." More »

burning questions

The Music Business: It Seems Like Everyone Is Kinda Tired

Yesterday's announcement of new iPods and a new version of iTunes revealed one biggish innovation on Apple's part: Genius, which is Apple's attempt at integrating last.fm/Pandora-like "recommendation" functionality into the music player. So far, it seems a bit imperfect to me: It's claiming that I'm "missing" songs that are next in line on my playlist; and its recommendations get a bit more dicey the further your listening habits stray from iTunes' best-sellers list. Kevin Maney at Portfolio wonders if the meh-ness of the products Apple unveiled yesterday is a sign that Apple has hit the wall, innovation-wise, in music, but Marc Cohen at Ad-Supported Music Central takes his argument one further, saying that the whole industry is in the doldrums, at least on the business side. More »

songs against sex

Is The Age Of Sexless Pop Music Here? (And Was It Inevitable?)

Last night at the Video Music Awards, American Idol winner Jordin Sparks veered from the script to defend herself against the incessant mocking of the Jonas Brothers' vows of chastity by host Russell Brand. "I just have one thing to say about promise rings. It's not bad to wear a promise ring, because not everybody—guy or girl—wants to be a slut," she said as an amused John Legend looked on. Sparks is a promise ring wearer herself; she chatted up her no-sex stance in the weeks after winning Idol, and she toiled in the Christian-pop scene before singing in front of Randy, Paula, Simon, and America. But is her dissent, and the somewhat positive reaction it's been getting in the VMA afterglow, a harbinger of a less sexed-up world of pop music? And was it only a matter of time? More »

burning questions

Is "Kala" The New "Play"?

If nothing else, the recent chart ascents of M.I.A.'s Kala and "Paper Planes" are fascinating for the parallels they evoke with... Moby. Think about it: Play was a modest-selling album by a critics' pet that thanks to truckloads of advertising wound up selling a huge number of copies; Kala finished second in Idolator Pop 2007 and is now climbing the charts (currently at No. 37, having sold 11,000 copies) thanks to its use in a movie (and trailer). I've long thought of Play as the signal album of the dot-com boom and bust, for many reasons, and it's interesting to see Kala in that light at this later date. No prizes for guessing M.I.A. will eventually sell 10 million, though.

the middlest of brows

Which British Pop Acts Should Be Classicalized Next?

September will, in the UK at least, see the issue of Songs Without Words, a collection of pop-rock hits that have been "classicalized." David Bowie, Sting, Coldplay—all your middlebrow favorites, given the ultimate middlebrow treatment. This is nothing new, of course; Christopher O'Riley has tenderly massaged the Radiohead catalog two times, and done the same for other artists' work as well. Still, a few big British names have been tragically overlooked in this "let's show everyone that this stuff is legitimate" sweepstakes, so we'd like to see which ones we should lobby Classic FM and UCJ Music for on the next edition of this comp. More »

burning questions

Do You Listen While You Work?

Something that came up in the comments section of the post on that new TV On The Radio song (which you should really listen to if you haven't already): While the numbers would seem to indicate that many Idolator readers visit the site while they're bored at the office, a fair amount of people said that they don't listen to music at work, and that while they can read the site when they're on the clock, they tend to wait until they get home to listen to audio and stream video online. I wonder what sorts of experiences those of you who are employed have had with this—I've actually had a few over the years, thanks to the different office environments I've worked in. More »

burning questions

Radiohead Vs. The Hold Steady: Whose Side Are You On?

Hold Steady guitarist Tad Kubler has caused the Internet to go nuts with his comments on Radiohead, which he made over the weekend to BBC6 Music. "I think they've lost the plot," Kubler said when asked the now-standard-in-every-music-interview question about Thom Yorke et al's recent album In Rainbows. "What are they doing? Where are they going? What's happening? I don't get it any more. They lost me. I still appreciate what they're doing, or what they're trying to do. But I think they're trying too hard not to be Radiohead. That seems a little ridiculous to me." Kubler then went on to praise... Oasis. Ooh, burn! Yorke and his bandmates were unavailable for comment, but the Internet was more than happy to rush in and fill that particular void. More »

burning questions

Whither The Ringle?

Remember those CD single/ringtone hybrids that were saddled with the awful name "ringles"? A post on Coolfer just reminded me that the initial announcement of the format came almost a year ago, but ringle nation doesn't seem to have really taken off: Amazon has 118 results for the search term "ringle," but some of them are just for artists with that name, and many of the listings for the actual ringles themselves only have secondary-market copies available. Not that I'd be surprised that something so ill-advised would die on the vine, but man, that was even quick for the Internet age.

burning questions

Which News Item Will Cause Music Snobs To Complain Louder?

The one about the Hold Steady playing a couple of shows in Europe as a support act for Counting Crows, or the one about the new Cure single featuring remixes by 30 Seconds To Mars' Jared Leto, My Chemical Romance's Gerard Way, AFI's Jade E. Puget, and Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump? I think it's a toss-up, although I have heard that there are a lot of Counting Crows fans lurking in the shadows out there... [AHN / NME]

burning questions

Did Wendy & Lisa Kickstart Pop-Cultural Lesbian Chic?

Choire Sicha posted an outtake from his Q&A with Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, which ran in the L.A. Times on Sunday. In it, Sicha asked the duo—who played guitar (Wendy) and keyboards (Lisa) in Prince's '80s band the Revolution and had a heavy hand in Purple Rain and to a lesser extent Sign 'O' the Times, and who have been scoring TV shows for the past decade and a half—whether they consider themselves godmothers of lesbian chic. More »

burning questions

How Much Does The Written Word Influence Your Perception Of Music?

During the course of yesterday's surprisingly contentious thread on Grizzly Bear's "Knife", a discussion of the influence of the written word on the way one hears pieces of music—particularly ones that are as lauded as "Knife," which pretty much sounded exactly the way all the bloggers and other music writers who were freaking out over it said it did when I finally heard it—ensued. And I wondered: Even though people constantly say music writing is dying, doesn't it have an effect on the way people eventually process music? Is that why I generally try to avoid reading one-sheets, "recommended if you like" blurbs, and other publicity about much-ballyhooed music until I've actually heard it? Excerpts from the discussion follow. More »

burning questions

British Tabloid Embarks On Quest To Unmask Reclusive Dubstep Producer

Untrue, by the pseudonymous artist Burial, is heavily favored to win this year's Mercury Prize, which is given to the best British album of a 12-month timeframe. But if Untrue should win as expected, the man behind the album will have to come out on stage and perform a song from the record—effectively revealing himself to the world and dispensing with any mystery the album might have at that point. So The Sun, not content with just showing boobs on its inside pages, is going to ruin the fun for everyone and unmask the guy before next month's ceremony! "Conspiracy theories are rife as to who is behind the tunes, with producers NORMAN COOK and APHEX TWIN in the frame," the paper writes, although the more savvy people who read Drowned In Sound are pooh-poohing that idea, saying that the writer only came up with the first two DJ names he could think of in the name of starting controversy. Ooh, burn! More »

I've received some 20-odd e-mails about those flyers and banner ads posing the all-caps query "WHERE DID ROCK N' ROLL GO?" over the past few weeks, so I figure I'm performing a public service by letting you all know that now, you can answer the question yourself on a brand-new blog. (According to the ID3 tags of the MP3 that is streaming from the site—usability warning!—a band named The Swindle Tourmaline (thanks Tim!) apparently has the answer.) [WHERE DID ROCK N' ROLL GO? via AbsolutePunk/ Pic via skidder]

arguing on the internet

Is Techno In A Holding Pattern?

This may be super-last-week of me to mention, but I admired Philip Sherburne's recent Pitchfork column about what he sees as a current malaise in dance music. For one thing, it's a piece whose main body (the stuff Sherburne wrote, not the quotes beneath it) you can read and substitute your own proper nouns into: it's apt about a lot more than just dance music right now. What's most interesting, though, is the light it sheds on dance music as a business. More »

burning questions

"The Believer" Music Issue: Can We Please Ask Ian MacKaye Some New Questions Already?

I've read two Q&A's in The Believer's 2008 Music Issue (there are three). One was illuminating, one less so. One of the issue's two Andy Beta pieces is a ripping Q&A with Sun City Girl/Sublime Frequencies co-founder Alan Bishop (there's more on Beta's blog as well). While I'm not fond of the "schema" format in which Beta jokingly lays out his unsuccessful attempts to find Molam music in Laos, the Bishop interview crackles: lots of clearheaded talk about the motivations behind Sublime Frequencies: Bishop is punk as fuck, right, whatever, but he's also someone who thinks through ethical questions even if you disagree with his answers. If only the other Q&A I read had the same kind of thrust.
More »