Radio Person 1: "Right then, shall we playlist this new Alphabeat single?"
Radio Person 2: "I fucking hate Alphabeat."
Radio Person 1: "I fucking love Alphabeat."
Radio Person 2: "Yeah they're a classic Marmite band. I suppose a lot of people do fucking love them so even though I do not like them myself I fully understand why they deserve a place on our radio station."
Radio Person 1: "Oh hang on, the new Snow Patrol single's arrived."
Radio Person 2: "Let's just play that then."

So, after describing the whole "marmite" ideal to Dan, we got down to business. What other artists are officially yeasty to a point of being utterly unpalatable to some, yet beloved by others?

danielgibson77: wait, there are people who don't like alphabeat?
mauraatidolator: i KNOW!
mauraatidolator: but who else could qualify for this distinction? who is so divisive that they rend internet message boards in two?
danielgibson77: my morning jacket?
mauraatidolator: hmmm.
mauraatidolator: no, they're just shitty.
danielgibson77: people like them, maura
mauraatidolator: well they're wrong.
mauraatidolator: vampire weekend!
danielgibson77: i think the same shitty argument could be made

See, the Popjustice folks say that "there's no value judgment involved," but I dunno, it feels like that could never, ever be the case, if only because the people on the "nay" side may never be convinced that the bands are not just 100% intractably awful. However, after doing some research—which mainly involves looking at the comment threads on past Idolator posts—I think I've come up with a handful of Officially Marmite Artists:

Pink Floyd.
Fall Out Boy. (Whose new Elvis Costello-aided single is quite good, btw. Oh noes, here come even more fights!)
Oasis. (Paging Jay-Z!)

And maybe The Doors? Those posts a few months back sure got a lot of attention. Anyway, add your own!

Marmite Music: A study [Popjustice]

It's certainly OK to have your preferences (I certainly have mine), but I'm not sure bragging that you just haven't bothered to listen to Bob Dylan, or whatever artist, is something to be proud of. There's certainly a lot of music out there, and there are just as many—if not more!—lists created every single day that have as their sole function telling you what you should already own and enjoy. But what happened to championing curiosity? I realized a few months ago that I hadn't heard Patti Smith's Horses in its entirety (to my knowledge), so I bought it. I don't love it, but at least, I've formed my own opinion.

One commenter mentions how often he hears the line "I've heard of him/her/them but have don't know his/her/their stuff", a line I'm guilty of repeating more often than I'd care to admit, but that seems more of a honest response to not having heard Santogold or the Fleet Foxes or whatever local band your friend's cousin is in, and not a strange anti-canon retort. Sure, I haven't heard every single piece of music listed on Acclaimed Music, but I at least want to try. The chart books clogging my bookshelf almost taunt me with artists and songs that haven't made it to various artist comps or greatest hits collections; to me, that unavailablility is part of the thrill of the chase. And before you ask, yes, I get sick of the lists too—I can't even fathom trying to wade through that 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die book I've seen everywhere lately. But is the only alternative to pretending you like a band you're barely familiar with (Slint seems to be the usual suspect) swinging to the other pole and staying blissfully unaware?

In Name Only [Monitor Mix]

The post is specifically about dance music, as is Ronan's wont; I suspect he's talking even more specifically about Resident Advisor's 2.0 (out of 5) review of SIS's "Trompeta"—a track Fitzgerald has blogged enthusiastically about—which concerns itself largely with the record's hype cycle. (There are lots of span classes in the post but no actual links.) Yet read the following paragraph and tell me he isn't talking about rock or hip-hop or every other music Web folks tend to check for:

This reactive reviewing seems to lend itself to world weariness too easily. People are pretending they’re so in the scene that they hear others talking about a big hit record everywhere they go, when actually all this tells you is they probably spend all day on the Internet! I should know! If people could say “I’m sick of HEARING this record” that’d be interesting, but it seems they’re more sick of hearing about it.

Obviously, "scene" is important in hip-hop or indie/alt-rock especially, as well as in dance music, but it's the internet part that's that matters here. The small pond takes on the aspects of a universe was never unique to the Web, as anyone who's ever identified themselves as part of a not-online subculture will happily explain. But the instant-expert rate is higher now, and so is the burnout rate, and while I realize I go on about this almost every week I slip into my guest chair, these are both good things to guard against even if you're not being paid to share your thoughts about music online or elsewhere. "Hype" won't kill us all, but it may just make us sillier—and right now, it's safe to say that's the last thing anyone needs.

Please [House Is a Feeling]

Artists continue to create great music but the business and technology people in the industry don't seem able to come up with any inspired new applications. More colors, more gigabytes and more music discovery options are just more of the same.

Innovation driven by a solid business case (not just the "we can do it, so we might as well" imperative) is what the music industry and the technology companies with music products and applications - need but are sorely lacking.

Now, Cohen is a big advocate of ad-supported music (as the title of his blog might suggest), and I know that he's frequently agitated for newer distribution methods that require people to pay for music with time; I suspect part of the innovation he's looking for involves models that embrace these ideas more successfully than, say, SpiralFrog. (Whether or not those ideas will ever bear out in the bottoming-out-as-we-speak music marketplace is another thing.)

But taking his complaint one step further, "more colors, more gigabytes, and more delivery options" could be extended to "more bands releasing singles via video games," "more bands patting themselves on the back for releasing records no one would buy anyway via the Pirate Bay," "more remixes of mildly popular bands' songs sponsored by companies," and so on, and so on. Sure, the fatigue on all sides probably stems equally from the double-whammy of the business being hit hard by people abandoning the idea of paying for its project and the economy, and while "hooks" like these may not be all that interesting once you probe deeper than their attendant press releases' second headlines, they'll definitely get press from the more story-hungry types out there. I guess what I'm wondering is, what can happen next? Is the "free vs. paid" music argument ever going to move beyond its current stalemated state? Will plastic guitars become the new Neo Geo once 2009's holiday season rolls around? And will the real, game-changing innovations happening now not be visible to the naked eye until three or four years down the road, when the reverberations of things that may seem minor now bowl over society, and I'm going to have to hope that more pop stars have onstage tantrums in the meantime?

Has Apple Hit The Wall In Music Innovation? [Portfolio]
Hitting The Wall In Music Innovation [Ad-Supported Music Central]

Let's face it: Culture is in a particularly porny period. Every famous person has had either a sex tape or a rumor about the existence of one out there; Joe Francis continues to roam free; people are adding the acronym "ILF" to the two letters that stand for "vice" and "president" for what I think may be the first time ever; and on the pop side of things, you have the just-now-loosening vice grip of the unsexily "sexy" "I Kissed A Girl," with its robotic glam-stomp and dead-eyed lyrics, on the pop charts. Could Sparks' putting her foot down last night be the beginning of a larger cultural pull-back from the hypersexualized world—even, maybe, because sexuality isn't the marketing machine it used to be, thanks to its desensitizing near-omnipresence?

There is the matter of Sparks' wording, of course; not everyone who has sex before marriage is a slut (unless they want to be, I guess?). But I wonder if her choosing to use the word "slut" in that particular context was as much a function of her anger at feeling slighted as it was her despondency about what a woman "has to" do in order to present herself in the current pop landscape. Sparks probably wouldn't have made it to the VMA stage if she hadn't won Idol, and she definitely wouldn't have reached it had she gone through the traditional pop-star gears; not very many plus-sized models go the MTV route, after all.

It's something to think about, particularly as whatever music can be labeled popular right now remains so rooted in being performed by adolescents. I wouldn't expect a regression to songs about soda shops and teen angels, mind you, but I do wonder if last night represented something of a turning point for at least a few people outside of the Christian-pop world as far as being able to tolerate the hot-pink-outlined, borderline-unerotic "sexuality" that's the inevitable result of even the most playfully erotic tropes being put through the commodification machine, and that's so often held up as a quality worth admiring.

Of course, this all could be moot in five years, when Sparks writes a tell-all in which she reveals that her outburst last night was the result of some particularly potent mind-altering substance. After all, in some prominent pop cases, the talk of "virginity pledges" and "promise rings" have been little more than a ploy—and one need look no further than the person sitting next to Sparks in the above photo for proof of that particular concept.

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The "Genius" of Celine Dion [Guardian]

At first, I had a stream of jobs where working with headphones on was normal; I was an "information professional" and wearing headphones in a way indicated that I was focused on the task at hand, and not wanting to be bothered. Then I moved into a position where I had to be present at all times both mentally and aurally; a lot of communication in the newsroom where I worked was done via across-the-room shouts (Let's face it: Yelling "hey, Sammy Sosa's bat is corked!" is a pretty expedient way of breaking news.) My music listening during work plummeted to almost nil; it was reserved for Sunday mornings, when I was the only person in the office and there was generally nothing big going on, and my back-and-forth commute to the office.

Now, it's a little different. Because of the pace of this job, I often find myself listening to either old reliables or stuff that isn't music at all; I save most of my non-newsworthy listening for my off hours, if only because I feel like I can concentrate on the whole body of work more, and not get any lyrics mixed into whatever bon mots I happen to be writing at the time.

So, what's your music-at-work story? Do you have permanent headphone-hair? Is there a communal set of speakers that you can sometimes commandeer? Or do you work in a place where the porny ads on Rapidshare and ZShare make even those sites OK for workaday consumption, as long as you're wearing headphones? And how has listening to music while work affected your listening habits aesthetically, if it has at all? Last week I put forth the following theory about bands of the milquetoast-indie ilk:

I've said this before, but my least favorite musical development these days is what I like to refer to as creative-professional indie: it's designed to exist in the background, playing at a tasteful volume on the communal work iTunes at some well-designed office where all the men have square plastic glasses and all the women dress just smartly enough to be taken seriously. (This could be why the lyrics have license to be terrible, btw. Who's paying attention?)

I've definitely been guilty of this kind of ambient-music abuse, of course. (Hey, it's probably why I'm so eager to pinpoint it.)

Perhaps my favorite reaction came from former Idolator guestblogger Matthew Perpetua, who wrote—in a post titled "Apples vs. Dim-Witted No-Talent Hacks"—"The most charitable description of The Hold Steady would be 'a glorified bar band with a tone-deaf asshole shouting over the top.' ... [they] are essentially just Nick Hornby as a rock band." (Which isn't far away from others' assessments of the group.) Meanwhile, Pitchfork's Marc Hogan referred to Kubler's quote as the band's "Sister Souljah moment."

Somewhat surprisingly, not all the reaction I've seen so far has been pro-Radiohead; another former guest of this site, Sam Yurick, said that he's kind of tired of the Radiohead hoopla and that praising In Rainbows for its distribution scheme is not unlike saying that Cloverfield should get an Oscar for its ads.

So readers, once and for all: How do you feel? (I was going to write "who could win in a fight," but if we're talking about sheer brawn, I think the winner is obvious.)

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Hold Steady vs Radiohead [BBC6 via half of my Tumblr friends]
Apples Vs. Dim-Witted No-Talent Hacks [Fluxtumblr]

Sicha: Do you think the surprisingly long-lived lesbian-chic, or bi-chic, trend is directly traceable to [Prince and the Revolution song] "Computer Blue"? Wendy: Holy mackerel! Lisa: Can I just say, yeah, why not? Wendy: Yes. "Lisa, is the water warm enough yet?" You mean that shtick? Lisa: Definitely. And that's what we intended. We wanted to create 'The L Word.' And I want credit.

Sicha has hit a jackpot here. Actually, Anil Dash has—he gave Sicha the question. However you want to dole out credit, the fact remains that someone has finally put on record something I've suspected for years. At the very least, they created my lesbian chic. Wendy & Lisa, I've realized over the years, helped make me into a dyke mike.

A what? I've used the term "dyke mike" for a while now—it's the reverse of "fag hag." One ex of mine referred to me as having a "lesbian flotilla," a phrase that's stuck among my friends (not least the flotilla). It probably helps that I've never fostered any straight-dude illusions about the nature of those friendships, but the truth is that I like lesbians for a reason even more adolescent than your average FFM fantasy: I like them because I think they're really, really cool.

I almost certainly learned to think that way from Wendy & Lisa. Sure, they were sidepeople to pop's then-reigning megalomaniac. (All votes for Madonna and Michael Jackson will be counted, of course.) But they were also, in Purple Rain his main foils, which counted for a lot. They humanized him—right, how feminine. But they did it because he came around to them, not because they mollycoddled him. As I grew more fascinated by Prince's music and began studying his liner notes, I realized that they did a lot of other things besides play guitar and keyboards. They arranged a lot—I didn't know what that meant when I was 10, 11, 12, but I did know it was important enough to credit, which was good enough for me. And of course as I grew older I began realizing just what they were referring to at the beginning of "Computer Blue." I just figured it was Prince pushing Puritan buttons again—I didn't know Wendy & Lisa were a couple until I read it in my 20s. I felt like a fool for not realizing it sooner. Then I decided that it made them even cooler than I'd already thought. And now I think so even more.

Oh man. [Choire Sicha]

While talking about the genesis of the piece, I wrote:

And the only way I'd ever heard "Knife" before was the way that every writeup of it I read described it, i.e. being reminded that there were tons of Beach Boys-y "shimmering harmonies" and "gorgeous orchestrations." (I've said this before, but "Knife" was the first time in a long time I listened to a song and it sounded *exactly the way everyone who wrote about it described it.*) Those writeups, you may not be surprised to learn, had zero allusions to doo-wop. Anyway, after I asked a few people what the deal was, Nick showed me the above video, and I said, "Hey! Write about it! Maybe others who are as flummoxed by the band's popularity as I am will understand what's going on here."

Anyhoo, perhaps that's another topic for another day — how much does reading about a song or record before you hear it influence what you ultimately hear?

(I also asked why everyone was so grouchy, but that's definitely another topic for another time.)

A few people took the thread further, including Ned Raggett:

... I try to avoid press releases as muttered elsewhere on here. Bad enough that talk of any sort can caused preconceived listening notions, now imagine having to write about it as well...

and MayhemInTheHood:

Where can I read a good article on the tendency of the bloghouse/indie bands latching on to one influence, then another, and so forth? Like earlier this decade it was VU-type sounds. Then somewhere along the lines, The Band was on a lot of bands minds. Now it's the Beach Boys...or anything that will permit them to label themselves "psych". Obviously someone has had a good write up about this subject. I'd be curious to see opinions on this.

I only bring it up because Maura mentions reading about comparisons of Grizzly Bear to Beach Boys, and I read similar stuff, but it always seems like it's just what they want to hear in the music...because I rarely agree. Maybe it's just me.

and, finally, moulty:

Immensely, for me, which I think is why I and people like myself like hearing leaks/listening to albums before the professional reviews hit.

Incidentally, whenever I try to visualize music it always ends up being pretty similar to the album/single art. Maybe I am an empty vessel?

Perhaps, although this synthesis doesn't bode well for the Metallica record at all.

So, I'm throwing the floor open to all of you, who I suspect read a lot more music-centric writing than the general population. Given that there's so much music writing out there in the ether, but at the same time less than ever on a professional, mass-disseminated scale, what effect does reading about music before hearing it have? Is this why music-recommendation engines are so popular among a certain subset—because some people just want to be told that their friends like an album, and figure out why on their own? And finally, am I digging my own music-writing grave here by even bringing this up?

Earlier: Grizzly Bear Find Their Essence On The Streets Of Paris
[Pic via the City of Albuquerque]

Burial has given interviews before in which he talks about his relative secrecy in an age where people are able to find out things like the shoe sizes of their favorite celebrities:

Burial's privacy stems from a fascination with what he describes as the "dark light" of UK club culture - enjoying music more the less you know about its makers. "I love that with old jungle and garage tunes, when you didn't know anything about them, and nothing was between you and the tunes. I liked the mystery; it was more scary and sexy, the opposite of other music."

Very true. But I doubt this will stop people from trying to figure out just who he (or she??) is before the Mercury's gong is bestowed to some album. So let's all try and one-up each other with one-man conspiracy theories about just who Burial may be.

My guess? Max Martin! After all, it's not like he's a stranger to disguising his forays into other genres, and this would be the ultimate punk-out of music snobs.

Help me dig up the real Burial [The Sun; HT Matos]
The Sun attempt to un-mask Burial [Drowned In Sound]

The piece hit the Web at an interesting time for me; the day before, prior to a weekly happy-hour DJ gig I do in Seattle (Havana, Pike between 10th and 11th, Wednesdays 7 to 9, stop by), I had decided to dive back into vinyl a little bit. God knows what prompted this: I have plenty of CDs and two fully loaded iPods to play off, and not much in the way of vinyl. Still, I put some money down for a needle (the bar has twin tables but you have to bring your own needles, standard operating procedure for many places) and picked up a couple of 12-inches. I was amazed at how expensive they were: one was a domestic (Lloyd's "Girls Around the World") and only $7, but the other, an import, was $13. As Sherburne explains,

[D]ance music is suffering from some very real maladies, many of them economic. Record sales are declining— labels that once could confidently move 1,000 copies of a 12" single now struggle to sell 250— and legal downloads, while presumably growing, aren't taking up the slack. In the U.S., a falling dollar and rising petrol prices have jacked the price of an import 12" single to $12 or more— and that's when you can find a record in shops (or, indeed, a record shop) at all. Recent high-profile closures of key dance-music distributors are both a symptom of a market in crisis and a cause of further problems: Unless you want to resort to mail-ordering from Europe or the UK, it's all but impossible to get your hands on most overseas vinyl these days.

Even if you can get the stuff, and even if you decide that it's worth shelling out $12 or more for two tracks you could purchase digitally for $3, playing vinyl is increasingly a pain in the ass for DJs, between carry-on limitations and rising fees for checked luggage. (I recently shelled out $80 to check a record bag I had carried into the UK on a flight out of Luton, owing to security restrictions that prohibit travelers from carrying aboard more than one bag. Forget about that "personal item.") The airlines' increasing behind-the-scenes disarray is translating into more lost luggage. (Remember Radio Slave's CD-only performance at MUTEK, after the airline misplaced his record bag.) And foreign DJs who want to play the U.S. without going through the onerous and expensive process of applying for an artist's performance visa are forced to forsake the black wax and perform only with a laptop, or risk being turned away at customs and immigration.

Tough times indeed—and that aspect of things, more than simply the music, is Sherburne's real concern here. Most of the responses (a couple of them private e-mails from colleagues, as well as many blog and message-board posts that Sherburne links from his own blog) have focused on the idea that the music itself is in grave danger, usually dismissively: there are lots of good tracks, what is he talking about, etc. And I understand them: I've found loads of good techno this year so far thanks to sites like Resident Advisor and Little White Earbuds, which have their ears to the ground and regularly review new tracks I've wound up loving that I might not have known about otherwise. (I'm a dance-music patriot for sure, but I've never been a real DJ and the amount I seek out has varied wildly over the years.)

Nevertheless, the idea that little new ground is being broken is hard to ignore—as it has been for some time now. Again, that's music-wide, not just in dance music. Maybe the innovations going on now are under the map—Sherburne's column is called "The Month in Techno," so you wouldn't necessarily expect him to be tracking, say, bassline/4x4/niche or the "funky house" that Tim Finney wrote up here (and elsewhere) a little bit back. And maybe they're happening too incrementally to reliably track on a record-by-record basis. But that sort of defines a style in stagnation, doesn't it?

That said, the thing I liked best about the piece was the "manifestos" that make up its second half. The two that knocked me over come from Marco Freivogel, who runs Mobilee (which recently issued an excellent 2CD compilation, Back to Back Vol. Two). Not just "No more plicky-placky" (amen, and I say that as someone who often likes plicky-placky), but this: "Nobody owns music. It comes to you and it leaves you. Music has its own way." Words to live by, I say.

The Month in Techno [Pitchfork]

You have to work hard not to get a decent interview from Ian McKaye, but the one in this issue is surprisingly and disappointingly one-note: all about Dischord's ethics, just like every other Q&A with Ian McKaye you'll likely read this year and decade and century. I don't blame Alex V. Cook for asking the questions he did, but I wish there had been more dimension—maybe some of that got cut out from the manuscript. Still, will someone interview this guy about music, please? Songwriting? All that fallback shit you trot out when the new album sucks but you need a few hundred words to fill the space? I bet he's got a huge record collection. I bet he knows shit about doo-wop that would blow your mind. I bet he can name all of Miles Davis's bands from the '50s to the '70s. I bet he's read more about rock history than most of us have. I bet he's a pretty interesting thinker about subjects you wouldn't expect. Somebody should really find out—and if someone has, please link it in the comments.

The Believer: July/August 2008 [The Believer]

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Set Issues Derail Britney's Madonna Shoot [E! Online]
Earlier: Madonna Outsources Tour Drama To Britney Spears

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Soulja Boy, Ice-T Feud Officially Over [AllHipHop]
Crank Dat Ice-T [YouTube]

Oh, Madonna. I really hope that Matthew Perpetua includes this track in s his whole "Your New Influences" thing sometime very soon.

(PS: The question in the subject line might in fact be moot, because "Miles" is definitely one of my favorite songs ever. I don't know what would even challenge it for No. 1. "Across 110th St"? "Borderline"? "Bathroom Wall"? The mind reels.)

Afghan Whigs - Miles Iz Ded] [YouTube]
MILES IZ DED the afghan whigs [YouTube]
Congregation [Sub Pop]

Aside from her singing, melodic and non-rhythmic elements in the arrangement have a somewhat subliminal effect on the listener, guiding and emphasizing dynamic shifts without distracting attention from its primal hooks. As the song approaches its climax, it gradually adds more textural elements without crowding out its abundant negative space and emphasis on percussion. (As far as I can tell, there is no guitar in the song whatsoever until its final minute.) Jam and Lewis' track is a masterpiece; a virtuoso performance that achieves an immediate, forceful physical effect via subtlety and nuance.

I suggest that musicians focus their attention on the arrangement of "Miss You Much" rather than Jackson's vocal performance or persona, but I would be remiss not to mention that her presence is essential to the success of the piece. Her voice effortlessly transitions from a rhythmic toughness to soulful emoting to a flirty softness without overselling any aspect of her performance, lending the song a continuum of emotions and attitudes that add up to the impression that we're listening to the expression of a fully-formed human being with contradictions and complexities.

I have to say that I would be much more likely to listen to indie that had the sort of backbone and physicality of "Miss You Much"; part of the reason that I was so down on that CSS album was that for a dance record, it was pretty lifeless, which contributed to the overall feeling of meh given off by it. (I'd also posit that the recent blogosphere frenzy around my personal favorite track of the year, Ida Maria's "Oh My God," is a direct result of that track taking some of the lessons of "Miss You Much" to heart, particularly when it comes to aural texture and shading.) The relegation of pop in indie culture to "semi-ironic whispery cover" is something that's continually irritated me, because it implies a knowledge of popular music without any further engagement with what musical mechanisms turn those songs into "pop, and I'm definitely looking forward to future installments in the series.

Also it would be great if Janet somehow found Perpetua's post and took his advice to heart, but I guess you can't have everything.

Janet Jackson - Miss You Much [YouTube]
Your New Influences No. 1 [Fluxblog]

The biggest first weeks of the year so far have been Mariah Carey's E=MC2, with close to 475,000 sold, followed by the Jack Johnson album I'm too indifferent about to look up the title for with 380,000. You'd have to think Usher will top Johnson for certain, and likely Carey as well, but when Confessions opened with nearly 1.1 million in 2004, that topping the half million mark first week is a question says something about the last four years for the industry.

So, Idolator readership, where will Usher end up next Wednesday?

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For its part, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is not amused by Amy and Pete's shenanigans.

The RSPCA warned that handling mice at such a young age could mean they are rejected or eaten by their mother.

Becky Hawkes, a spokeswoman for the RSPCA, told Sky: "New born babies should be undisturbed, and with their mother - smell is critical for small rodents.

"It's because the babies will be contaminated by human smells and the mother could reject or eat them."

A worker for the National Animal Welfare Trust said: "You don't disturb any baby creature, whether it's puppies or kittens or mice - you leave them with the mum.

"And you should definitely scrub your hands - just as you would with a new-born baby."

Nice for you to assume they knew that.

if i ain't got you [YouTube]
Duo Blasted For Baby Mice Treatment [Sky]

My initial answer: It's not good. And further thinking about this looming crunch has made me wonder if the current festival bubble we're seeing now isn't dissimilar to the housing bubble that's been deflating over the past 18 months or so—festivals are in the "unsustainable growth on the backs of depleting resources" part of the cycle, with the big reunions and big names that draw in people now being sort of analagous to "exotic" mortgages in that there's a payoff now (Prince appearance that results in Saturday night being a sellout/smaller mortgage payment that allows you to spend money on frivolous items like Coachella tickets) that will turn into a liability later unless people get creative (reunion shows coming around for the second time and losing their "special" luster/whopping increase in mortgage payment). In the case of avoiding the high mortgage payment, "getting creative" meant flipping the house before the market went tits-up, but how are organizers of festivals this year going to do the same? Forcing Prince and Roger Waters to engage in a dance-off to figure out, once and for all, whose house each festival site actually is? Getting Jay-Z and Stephen Malkmus to do a half-assed version of "The Slack Album" live? Or maybe, in an effort to maximize crossover potential, having T-Pain on hand for run-ins during every single set of the entire weekend? (At the very least, imagining what My Morning Jacket will sound like with Teddy Pinned-Her-Ass-Down glommed onto their sound has made me giggle for the past five solid minutes.)

The best show of the year? [Hitsville]
[Photo: AP]

Anyway, that little interlude made me wonder if our readers would be as dismayed by the fake radio offerings as Disembodied Hand Man was—so here's a poll.

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I'm pretty sure that this is going to be lopsided in one direction, but hey, I may be wrong. The one good thing about Roger Waters' set, though? It made me appreciate the greatness of Black Mountain even more. Holy balls were they fantastic.

• If Guitar Hero has inspired Fall Out Boy and John Mayer to rock hard and fast, imagine what it will do to musicians who already kind of do?

• Emo kids already dress hair-metal; this cover may inspire them to play it.

• Fall Out Boy now has three hits that aren't ballads. Perhaps established rock bands will realize there is actual commercial potential for songs that aren't slow, turgid, or any other quality we associate with Nickelback.

• This song's success might keep Fall Out Boy from putting out so many damn ballads themselves.

• Patrick Stump can sing pretty well, and he avoids that anonymous, butt-cleching nasal tone we associate with most emo acts. Hell, in the world of emo this kid is Teddy Pendergrass or something.

• The return of the instrumental solo to pop music. Today the guitar, tomorrow the saxophone!

Beat It - Fall Out Boy ft. John Mayer - Guitar Hero [YouTube]

1. Wikipedia doesn't use Flash. Or blinking backgrounds. Or huge images that take up 1,068 vertical pixels before you get to word one of any sort of useful information. Or other slideshows that jam up your computer and make it crash when you're in the middle of writing something and on deadline and AAGGGH.

2. Wikipedia may be crazily draconian in its efforts to police entries for "objectivity" (the Billboard story points out that artists and managers are missing out on using the user-generated encyclopedia as a "resource" for getting out their propaganda, but that would probably result in many "neutral point of view" wars that would ultimately be a waste of said artists/managers' time), but you sure aren't going to get the real lowdown on, say, the differences between the two versions of LA Guns if you go to either of the current bands' landing pages. And what is "objectivity," anyway? Wait, that's a question for my media studies night-school class. Sorry!

3. MySpace does have one advantage over Wiki: The access it gives you to artist photos is much, much better. However, to get to those photos, you have to log in, which means you have to have an account, which means you have to open yourself to the possibility that your identity might be stolen to hawk Macy's gift cards and Fergie porn.

4. Seriously, you guys. The Flash. It can't be just me, right? My computer isn't that old.

Music fans prefer Wikipedia to MySpace [Reuters]

In a post topped with the not-at-all-inflammatory title "Is Jack White trying to kill music journalism?," David Bennun posits:

Despite the obvious drawbacks for any reviewer in not being able to audition the record in advance - one might even see this as a direct attack on the very existence of music journalism - I have to say that, like a turkey who can see the merits of Christmas, I quite like the whole idea. Whether born of innovation, boldness, spite, or some combination thereof, it strikes me as an effort to put the clock back rather than forward.

Given the band's recommendation that the release is best heard on vinyl, and their wish that digital services might consider offering it for sale without breaking it up into its component tracks, their principal aim would appear to be protecting the integrity of the album format (reports of whose death are greatly exaggerated) as a cohesive piece of work rather than something to be nibbled at, piecemeal.

It gives one a warm glow to read that: "The Raconteurs feel very strongly that music has worth and should be treated as such." This privileging of artistic vision over marketing is so unusual in the music business as to be quite startling. It's a shame that it's only really viable for an act which, including as it does Jack White, already possesses both presumed financial security and an existing audience. If nobody had heard of the Raconteurs, then without pre-publicity, they might as well shoot the album into space as release it to an oblivious public, regardless of format, date, content or the best of intentions.

So I guess the answer to the headline's question is "no"? Well, never let it be said that the upper-crust British press can't get as sensational as its tabloid compatriots. And really, I'd think that those people "defining it FOR YOU" that Jack White and Co. are talking about don't just include music critics, since nobody seems to really pay those folks too much mind. (Unless they write for a certain Best New Music-bestowing outlet.) He's probably talking about blabby bloggers and comment-section denizens along with those more-marginalized-than-ever critics.

If anything, the way the Raconteurs album fares will be a much better bellwether for how rush-released albums that haven't been promoted via traditional press fare in the current marketplace, where hostility to paying for recorded music is the norm—even among people who don't have access to the Internet. Of course, as Bennun points out, these sorts of anti-marketing strategies are currently only really working for artists whose initial profile was elevated by the promotion apparatus of the old-school record biz—am I really the only person in the world using the term "the Stars model"?—and it's somewhat troubling to think about how that little detail might, in fact, result in even the middle class of rock and roll semi-unwittingly becoming shaped by the now-crumbling top-down infrastructure of large labels down the road.

Is Jack White trying to kill music journalism? [Guardian]
Earlier: Jack White To Industry: Oh Yeah? Well, Watch This

First of all, let's leave all Beach Boys songs besides "Kokomo" out of this. I have enough respect for the band's body of work to not put Adam Green and Ben Kweller anywhere near the Boys' league. But "Kokomo" is a prime example of the crappy-production plague that struck so many once-great artists in the '80s (Jimmy Buffett, I am looking you square in the face). The band's harmonies are still dead-on, but the rest is a bit like watermelon Bubblicious: sweet, but somehow depressing. Maybe it's John Stamos on the drums, or the absence of Brian Wilson, or the complete lack of bass guitar (I see it in the video but I don't hear it).

Whatever it is, the Beach Boys' original version lacks heft. And if there's one thing that Green can add to a song it's luxurious production. Of course Green also sings incredibly vulgar nonsense in an affected lounge-singer style, so a solo cover probably wouldn't have come off quite as charming as a collaboration with sweet, goofy Ben Kweller. Their combined talents and sensibilities surpass the Beach Boys' pastel original.

Is anyone with me on this? Or am I justing continuing my alienation streak? Furthermore, how often, if ever is a cover superior to the original?

"Kokomo" Adam Green and Ben Kweller [The Hype Machine]

Today's Inventors Spot post tipped us off to its "existence," but Lyons was actually issued his patent in 1992, and the musical condom remains unavailable for purchase at your local drug store or Radio Shack. A few years back a Ukranian science guy claimed to have invented a condom with a little loudspeaker that played some MIDI bleeps as you sinned before God. But Lyons' condom seems much more in line with the freedom of choice of the ringtone age, as his patent claimed you could capture any song you wanted on condom. Like "Yakety Sax"! Or maybe the Misfits' "Last Caress." While the potential for ruined relationships is high, the potential for relationship-ending comedy is even higher. Scientists and condom manufacturers... you have eight days to make this happen!

Great Invention Idea? A Musical Condom [Inventors Spot]

P.S. If it ever did go into production, please let us know.

P.P.S. You were also supposed to be able to record yourself leaving a message for your partner's orifice. Like "open up the hangar for the airplane!" Or maybe just the sound effect of a Mack truck beeping as it backs up. Or the Law And Order "ch-chung!"

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DRM Questions Continue, Experimental Data Remains Foggy [Digital Music News]

MEDIA WEB QUESTION OF THE DAY: Do music critics help you decide what's good or are they merely blowhards?
WEDNESDAY PET PEEVE: Critics who care more about showing how smart they are instead of helping the readers understand the arts.

Well, you know, one of my pet peeves involves writers who are trying to big-up the work of artists they like, then take it as a personal affront when people don't respond the same way. But nobody asked me.

Seriously, though—while Friedman's column (which will probably reach a lot more people than a 60-word blurb about the record in Entertainment Weekly's ever-shrinking music section) is the first I'd heard of Voice, it's a little bit of a leap to say that "blowhard" music critics who are only interested in "showing how smart they are" is the primary reason for the near-radio silence regarding it. Not that critics are completely innocent of that behavior, but there's an elephant in the room here that Friedman's gracefully sidestepping, and that's the fact that Voice is an opera—sure, it's one by a musician who has a devoted cult following, and it features some boldfaced names, but it's still an opera.

You'd think a media critic would know that, as part of the general shrinking of music-writing space over the past few years, classical coverage has been decimated by newspapers and magazines in favor of music that "the people" (the elitist people?) want; the only new releases in that genre to get coverage on a mass scale at all are by pop stars like Paul McCartney and Billy Joel, both of whom appeal to the mass much more than even Elvis Costello. And really, an opera by Steve freaking Nieve—with Robert Wyatt getting top billing over Costello, at that!—would be catnip for these straw-man critics who are obsessed with the idea of peacocking their smarts, or at least their encyclopedic knowledge of early Attractions bootlegs, all over the page.

The chicken-and-egg scenarios that Friedman's completely misunderstanding here—do critics write like elitists, thus alienating readers? do readers not care about music writing anyway, thus allowing critics to fall back on old habits? does the increased categorization of music mean that things that don't fit into any one genre fall by the wayside? does the "please the reader" mandate in a lot of arts coverage now have the same effect? should some Pitchfork writer just give the damn thing a 6.1 so Friedman will quit complaining?—are legion, but they all boil down to one thing: He's pretty much clueless. But hey, at least there are some people out there who think that music critics still matter!

Media lip service hurts a rock 'n' roll hall of famer [Marketwatch]

Okay. First, the pros:

The show may actually have music-related content, and when do you see that on VH1 anymore? The theme song is a Bret original. There's a woman in the house who, upon seeing a drum kit, made a beeline for it and started playing. Surely the guys in Warrant would jump at the chance to visit a house full of ladies and be on camera at the same time.

Bret Michaels doesn't seem like that bad a guy. Yeah, he's a rock star and by extension kind of gross, but it's not like he's as disgusting as Vince Neil. (By the way, how did he not get asked for this first? "He's married" isn't even an excuse.) And there's even a promo during which he talks about his diabetes, which I'm sure will be amazing fodder for tipsy-lady chitchat.

I'll probably be sucked into it anyway. The season pass has already been thrown onto the TiVo, although I'd likely watch more of the show—particularly the stripper-pole scenes—on fast-forward were I not engaging with the show in some sort of "professional" capacity.

And the con—there's only one, but it's a doozy:

I feel pretty bad enough about humanity as it is. Also, what happens if I see someone I knew in high school on there? I'd have to take a long, hot lye shower, and those are never fun.

Anyway, I'm throwing it open to you, readers. If the numbers call for it, I'll watch it tonight and write it up, thus attracting all the Google News stragglers:

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Rock Of Love [VH1]