Idolator

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 »

Grrrl-rock standard-bearer Carrie Brownstein took to her blog to discuss a phenomena she witnessed at a Fleet Foxes show: the "strangely beautiful" phenomenon of bromance, "where mostly straight men show up to shows in small packs, high-fiving during songs, raising glasses at the band in a show of brotherly love, and shouting 'I love you!' toward the stage." She asks the readers to comment with "bromantic" shows they've attended; while the Hold Steady seems to be the consensus pick as far as which band is inspires the most male-on-male admiration, most of the bands mentioned are linked by shared roots in '70s rock. As a result, I've noticed at least two distinct types of "bromance": for lack of a better nomenclature, I'll call one folk/country bromance (exemplified, in Brownstein's post, by the Fleet Foxes crowd) and the other bar-band bromance (seen among Hold Steady fans). This oft-overlooked distinction is important to understanding the phenomenon. More »

Former Sleater-Kinney guitarist/vocalist Carrie Brownstein blogs at NPR, and her latest post has a fully cleared MP3 mix that has tracks by the likes of Pylon and Wire, and is appended with a note: "This mix was supposed to have the Grateful Dead on it, whose music I really love, but they refused unless we promised to do a piece on them on All Things Considered. In addition, we would need to run a feature on The Dead on the site. Here's a sentence I've never written: Someone needs to take a bong hit and chill out. Just a simple 'no thanks' would have sufficed. Are The Dead really in need of publicity? Because I swear there's a dancing bear sticker on every third car I see in Portland." Hey, they're just trying to take blog payola to the next level! Never underestimate those dancing bears' marketing savvy. [Monitor Mix; HT BV]