RUNRIG
Year of the Flood: Live at Loch Ness by these Scottish folk-rockers entered Denmark's album chart at No. 4 last week, but their not-very-updated MySpace page still says their "new" album is 2007's Everything Thing You See, which apparently went No. 1 in Denmark, and a picture of it shows a guy playing field hockey on the cover. Confusing, but who cares—they recorded an album live at Loch Ness! How bloody cool is that? I wonder if they saw the monster! (Though Plesiosaurus or no, how advisable is it to record at a loch in a flood year? Just a thought.) Anyway, said cryptozooligists have been around for a while; Wikipedia says they formed in 1973, and their lineup once featured a future member of Parliament for the "centre-left" Scottish National Party who previously used to play in Big Country—and actually, the excellent "Clash of the Ash" on the band's MySpace gloriously rocks the pub in a fraternal Big Country meets Graham Parker meets Richard Thompson meets Clash meets Ash manner, with manly working-on-chain-gang grunts punctuating exhortations about "For every fighting highland man/Stand by your brother, die for the clan." Dropkick Murphys should totally cover it, and I could imagine it on Rescue Me in a bar scene following a firefight. The video, naturally, features yet more field hockey. More trivia from the band's Wiki entry: Runrig hit No. 86 in the U.K. with a song called "Loch Lomond" in 1983, then went No. 9 in the U.K. last year with a new version of the song featuring the Tartan Army. So maybe they just like lochs a lot.

LOS CARDENALES DE NUEVO LEÓN Y DINORA
Like the far less lengthily monikered Runrig, these veterans employ accordion for middle-aged drinking men and women to shake their hips to. But rather than jigs, Los Cardenales fill the dancefloor with highly mustachioed and cowboy-hatted midtempo cantina polkas. They formed as a "traditional norteño fivesome" in Monterrey in 1982, explains Ramiro Burr in his Billboard Guide To Tejano and Regional Mexican Music. Their logo features an actual redbird, just like St. Louis' baseball team, and their "Flor De Las Flores" holds tight at No. 42 on Hot Latin Songs after entering at No. 39 last week. In a strangely minimalist video, somebody's car radio plays the song while driving in the rain on what may or may not be the Jersey Turnpike, so we get to look out the windshield, and watch both plenty of traffic—mostly headed in the other direction—and the windshield wipers. Also, Los Cardenales' MySpace friend George put some "You Know You're Mexican If..." jokes on their page, such as: "You have ever been hit by a chancla"; "You can play any sport wearing your chanclas"; "You know a Chola known as L.A. Shy Girl who is loud and obnoxious", "You not only know who Don Francisco is, but you tell people he's your Tio." Some of those are probably funny!

MAINO
Brooklyn MC briefly hit No. 98 on R&B/Hip-Hop Songs last week with "Hi Hater": a dinky, burbling electrobeat under a vocal that manages to accentuate the rhythm despite its typically monotonous hardness. Rhymes "dollar bill y'all" with "lotta bills y'all"—boy, a lot of thought went into that one. Might be interesting if it was about paying bills, but if it is, he never expands on the thought. Plus he says "bitch and "motherfucker" a whole lot. His second MySpace song has him keeping it gangsta since the side of his face has been cut by a razor, with guest spots by Lil Kim and Busta Rhymes, both sounding every bit as tedious as usual. A snippet from "All In Need," Maino's token sensitive number: "What I need is my dogs to trust me/A good dog who likes to suck me/And I don't care if the bitch is ugly." Why does crap like this still exist? Strange MySpace comment from That Diamond Diva Girl: "Hey MAINO, I just bought you as my pet. Click here to find out how much I think you're worth." I didn't, but then I'm a hater.


WALLS OF JERICHO
Female-fronted and fairly well-played "Hardcore/Metal/Rock" from Detroit, with a name and album titles (With Devils Amongst Us All, From Hell, etc.) that suggest some nutty hybrid of Satanism, Christianity, and Palestinian history. Their new one, an acoustic EP called Redemption, entered Heatseekers at No. 49 last week, assisted at least in part by its $5.99 retail price; this week, it slips 99 places, to 148. Ozzfest and Family Values tour spots and a connection with Slipknot/Stone Sour dude Corey Taylor, who produced the new release and sings a duet on it, probably haven't hurt. Also, their bassist is reportedly a well-known straightedge tattoo artist, and they're real globe-trotters: June gigs scheduled in Indonesia and Singapore; an imminent DVD of live performances from South America; MySpace comments this month from fans in Japan and Sweden and Antarctica—hey, anything to get out of Detroit, right? What's most impressive about their "A Trigger Full of Promises" video, though, isn't so much how feral and enraged Candace Kusculain's by-the-book moshpit tantrum sounds as how normal she looks.

PURENRG
Certain concerned readers always start whining whenever I include Christian acts on this countdown, as if Christian pop doesn't deserve to made fun of just as much as every other genre (and as if I always make fun of it anyway), but I can't let that scare me away. PureNRG is made up of a 15-year-old boy, 13-year-old girl, and 12-year-old girl from Nashville whose Here We Go Again bounced onto the Christian album chart at No. 4 last week, though this week it tumbles to No. 28. Their MySpace page lists their only "influence" as Jump5, which I sure hope doesn't cause kids at Jordan Yates' high school to tease him. But even if they do, he might not mind—plenty of girls who write YouTube comments clearly think he's "soooo hot =D" regardless. PureNRG's jumpy CD cover really does resemble the cover of Jump5's 2001 debut, but what it looks even more like is the cover of B*Witched's far preferable debut from 1998. "Here We Go Again" has the kind of bubblegum funk-rock riffs and sunshine-pop bah-bah-bahs that have enlivened teen-pop since the Osmonds and Partridge Family, and the trio also cover "Footloose," from a movie that I guarantee somebody somewhere still believes is anti-Christian. "What If" is about how, with Jesus' love, you can grow up to be a fashion model or Super Bowl quarterback or cheerleader or discover the cure for cancer. Here's a fan called NADteam, commenting on a YouTube video: "At church, the class I'm in has to pay 10 cents for using a euphemism, such as 'heck'"... I was mostly saying gee and geez cause I have been raised not to say gosh." Which is kind of weird, since PureNRG also have a MySpace friend known as "Tex ASS." A sign of the mobile times, from MySpace pal Kay-Kay: "I got your album the 1st day it came out and immeadiatly put it on my phone and I listen to it consantly, it's amazing." Hey, I have nothing against Christian pop, I swear on a stack of King James bibles. But I definitely have something against people who listen to albums on phones.


THE MORMON TABERNACLE CHOIR
Nothing I say about Salt Lake City's 161-year-old-and-counting vocal ensemble is going to change your opinion about them, assuming you have one (I don't, personally), so here are some raw facts instead: (1) Their new album Called To Serve scanned more than 4,100 copies this week, enough to let it check in at No. 181 on the Billboard 200. (2) "In total they have appeared and sang at 13 world fair expositions. Five of the choir's recordings quickly reached 'gold' and 'platinum' record status. The most popular being of 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' that was released in 1959. No other choir can compare in contrast with that of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The 360 members represent a very different array of professions." (3) As of Thursday, they had 864 friends on their MySpace page, including "Negateevo," "FemaleDorito," "im 18 yeah," 97-year-old "Gordon B. Hinckley" (who also lists Vivaldi, Clay Aiken, and Orrin Hatch among his favorite music), and "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints." (4) Their music is also available on Last.fm. (5) "It truly is a God given gift to have such an amazing choir on the face of the earth."

Anono-Prick passed on assessing the March and April issues of Vibe. He recalls glancing at the former and thinking that it didn't look very interesting; as for the latter, he thought that it was kinda lame that the mag went with a Lil Wayne cover story less than six months after the guy led their November issue. AP wanted to be generous to Vibe this time around.

So the June 2008 Vibe, which is intended to herald the summer, appears with none other than the patron saint of all outerborough broads on the cover. Mariah Carey, make no mistake, still sells records—at a time in which expectations for sales of tangible recorded product dwindle down further and further, she commands something like a consensus. Fortyish hausfraus remember "Vision of Love" fondly, their younger, cougar-ish sisters and cousins still dance to "Fantasy" at the club, and their daughters either prize her influence on American Idol contestants or contemplate twisting around the pole to the strains of "Touch My Body." And all manner of dudes would not, shall we say, turn that shit down. (AP digs most of her singles a ton; "One Sweet Day" with Boyz II Men is his fave.)

Vibe can't go wrong, right? You'd think that the mag would send a scribe to follow Carey around for a bit and perhaps extract some clues that she was very serious about Nick Cannon, the actor/rapper described in the story as a "recent acquaintance" and whom she married a month after the events described in this issue took place?

No dice. There is no evidence in "Body Language," the piece accompanying the cover, that Ms. Carey consented to anything vaguely resembling an interview with the piece's writer, associate editor Shanel Odum. In her editor's letter, EIC Danyel Smith describes a delegation including herself, Odum, fashion editor Memsor Kamarake, and photo editor Robyn Forest traipsing off to Antigua, where Carey celebrated her birthday and where the reporting and the photo shoot for this story transpired.

Odum employs mucho purple prose in depicting the firestorm that ensues amongst Carey's handlers in the run-up to a photo shoot, how Carey comports herself during the shoot itself, and how much she, her nephew, Cannon and bunch of other folks enjoyed themselves during her lavish birthday celebration that evening. Odum records one solitary quote from Carey, during the shoot, in which she requests different lighting.

And that's it: the mag's readers are supposed to be satisfied with a few words regarding Odum's five hours in Carey's general, but very fabulous, vicinity.

It's hard to understand how Smith, an editor whose first time at the rodeo was many years ago (she alludes to her own audience with a more forthcoming Carey for a Vibe story a decade ago in her editor's letter), could possibly stand for her writer being denied significant access to the subject of her magazine's cover story. She had to have known this would be a dog of a story, notwithstanding what might have been a pleasant trip for her and her staffers.

If a celebrity is awarded the cover of a entertainment magazine, then that celebrity will consent to at least fifteen minutes of innocuous conversation with a reporter for the magazine. Perhaps the reporter will try to solicit an interesting quote, which a celebrity of Carey's caliber will do their level best to bat away. At least that's been the prevailing modus operandi for entertainment journalism for the past twenty years, but maybe Smith and her peers are adjusting to the following, emerging facts:

1. superstars will grant the access they feel like at a particular time;
2. vague access is better than no access;
3. superstars are not afraid of alienating particular music magazines, a double-fucked species of cultural commerce; and
4. editorial muckety-mucks can go jump in the lake if they don't like any of the above.

Indeed, it could be that Carey's surrogates dicked Smith and her retinue around, or it could be that Smith agreed to the Carey camp's contention that she would not speak directly to a Vibe writer—although this seems inconceivable to AP. It could also be that Smith knows that her group left Antigua with something much, much more important than a record of Carey's current state of mind. Namely, they left with photographs of Carey arching her back and frolicking in three expensive swimsuits while on the beach. This, more than evidence of a fleeting conversation, was Smith's primary quarry in Antigua, and the consequences would have been far more grave should she have returned without it.

Otherwise, the June issue includes a list of the top "summer bangers" (and runners-ups) of the past decade, of which AP can only say that from May to September 2006 he heard Chamillionaire's "Ridin' Dirty" a helluva lot more than he heard T.I.'s "What You Know" on the radio. And "It's Murder," an oral history regarding Irv Gotti's Murder Inc., the gangsta pop idiom Gotti proffered in the early '00s, and feuds with both federal government and with 50 Cent, is mildly interesting, if premised on the shaky notion that Gotti's hitmaking acumen is undimmed.

In Ms. Smith's editor's letter, she paraphrases ODB's fabled verse on Carey's "Fantasy": "Vibe and Mariah do go back like babies and pacifiers." AP supposes that's not far back enough to ensure that the writer of the cover story for her magazine was granted at least a brief conversation upon which a semi-credible profile could be constructed. Smith's editor's letters have alluded to at best the opacity and at worst the uncooperative attitudes of the people on her magazine's covers. Perhaps it would have been impolitic to candidly discuss what seems like a gratuitous insult from Camp Carey, but AP would have appreciated a bit of transparency from Smith on this matter.

But, like AP said above, Smith got the most important things she needed in Antigua: several photographs of Mariah Carey in a number of bathing suits.

The upper reaches of this week's Billboard Hot 100 are a little sleepy—two songs sneak into the bottom rungs of the Top 10, and every song above them either holds position or moves at most a spot or two.

But one of the Top 10 entrants boasts an unusual pair of credits: he has his first Top 10 hit as a recording act in the same week that he's enjoying his first chart-topper as a songwriter. Making it somewhat more unusual, at least among multi-hyphenate types: he just turned 21 about a month ago.

We're talking about former boy bander, former small-screen star, and TRL mainstay Jesse McCartney. The song he co-wrote—Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love," penned with OneRepublic schlock-meister Ryan Tedder—is actually in its fourth nonconsecutive week at No. 1. The newer hit is his own: "Leavin'," which leaps four spots to No. 10 after a huge, iTunes-fueled debut last week.

Throw in the fact that he did a voice for the March blockbuster Horton Hears A Who! and this kid's having an awfully good spring.

Most weeks, a song rising four places into the Top 10 is nothing to blog about, but McCartney's little move defies recent trends in a big way. Just moving up the chart at all after such a big, sales-driven debut is unusual.

Look at what happened to last week's highest debut, Chris Brown's "Forever," which materialized at No. 9. As I expected, this so-called "special edition" bonus cut fell out of the Top 10 in week two. It follows the typical pattern of songs that debut big on sales alone but haven't gotten on the radio yet. Sure enough, "Forever"'s sales drop 21% and it continues to lack radio airplay.

I expected that, after popping onto the chart at No. 14 last week, McCartney would experience a similar second-week swoon. After all, "Leavin'" has been available to radio stations and MTV since early March, and until last week it looked like a flop. But the song's numbers actually improved in week two: digital sales now top 100,000, an 8% improvement, and it's finally made an appearance on Billboard's all-format radio list. Radio PDs are usually quite a bit slower to respond to sales smashes.

Nowadays it's not at all unusual in the world of hip-hop to see acts flipping between writing/producing and performing. When a Diddy or Fitty type is hot, you'll see them all over the charts with multiple above- and below-the-line credits. But in the pop world, at least recently, it's fairly unusual for someone so young to pull it off.

And the simultaneous coming-out as writer and performer is quite unusual, even in the not-so-recent past. Big hits co-written by that other McCartney, but performed by other acts, came after a slew of Beatles smashes. Other singer-songwriters flipped the order, first writing Top 10s and then recording their own: Dylan scored hits by the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary years before "Like a Rolling Stone"; for Bruce Springsteen, Top 10s penned for Manfred Mann and the Pointer Sisters came before his own "Hungry Heart."

Okay, I'm not going to remotely compare this TRL pipsqueak's talents to any of the above. "Leavin'" is charming and catchy and that's about it; and that Leona Lewis hit is rapidly turning into an earworm fungus. (Actually, the fact that I love the verse and build of "Bleeding Love" and hate the repetitive-ass chorus makes me want to credit McCartney with the former and blame Ryan "Apologize" Tedder for the latter.) Also, it's not as if McCartney just started recording—his slow-building, eventually inescapable hit "Beautiful Soul" reached the Top 20 way back in 2004.

Still, the fact that he now bookends the Top 10 after never appearing there at all before a few weeks ago is a worthy achievement. Nice going, Bradin.

Here's a rundown of the rest of this week's charts:

• I shouldn't neglect the other new Top 10 hit, which actually made a bigger move than McCartney, up 11 spaces to No. 8. But the reason Natasha Bedingfield's "Pocketful of Sunshine" don't impress me much is that it had an assist from American Idol—Bedingfield performed the song on last week's results show. "Sunshine" is the third-biggest digital seller this week, more than doubling to 135,000 downloads, but radio is still catching up; in its third week on the all-airplay list, it sits just outside the top 50.

This is Bedingfield's first Top 10 hit since her unkillable up-with-people anthem "Unwritten" reached No. 5 two years ago. Two years is not a bad span between Top 10 hits, but it's notable because there have been numerous failed attempts to get the British Bedingfield past the sophomore jinx in America over the past year: her British hit "I Wanna Have Your Babies" was nixed for American release last year, and her incongruous duet with Sean Kingston, "Love Like This," just missed the Top 10 in January and didn't do much for sales of her U.S. album. The "Sunshine" single finally appears to be doing the trick, as her album sales are up 200% this week.

• Weezer moves into the penthouse on the Modern Rock chart with "Pork and Beans," surprising no one after last week's explosion into the Top Three on that list. On the big chart, however, the single is looking like a dud, falling six spots to No. 90. Digital sales are down 11%, and non-rock radio stations aren't picking up on the laconic twanger at all—it's nowhere to be found on the Hot 100 Airplay list.

• Madonna's quest to take "4 Minutes" to No. 1 is clearly over. Even though Hard Candy debuted atop the album charts, the single doesn't get the typical corresponding release-week boost and slips two notches to No. 6 on the Hot 100. That may be because, like Mariah Carey, Madge is already moving on to single number two: the Pharrell Williams-backed "Give It 2 Me" is the Hot 100's top debut at No. 57, thanks to its nearly 30,000 digital downloads. It's kind of ironic, because slow-moving PDs were just catching on to "4 Minutes"—after weeks of slow-growing airplay, it's finally approaching the 10 most-played songs on the radio.

• We'll talk more about this next week, but for now, I'll give you a topic to discuss. Resolved: special-edition bonus tracks are a scam, but they work.

The reason we'll have more to talk about a week hence is that next week's chart-topper could be Rihanna's "Take a Bow," a song from the forthcoming "special edition" of Good Girl Gone Bad. "Bow" currently resides all the way down at No. 53 after four weeks on the chart, but thus far it's been charting based on airplay alone. That's about to change, big-time: "Bow" was released this past Tuesday on iTunes and already is No. 1 there. Like Chris Brown with his "special edition" track "Forever," sales alone for "Bow" will undoubtedly be enough to vault it into the Top 10. But unlike Brown, she's got solid and growing airplay for the snippy ballad, which suggests a leap all the way to the top is possible. Stay tuned.

Top 10s
Last week's position and total weeks charted in parentheses:

Hot 100
1. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 1, 12 weeks)
2. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 2, 8 weeks)
3. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 3, 18 weeks)
4. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 5, 12 weeks)
5. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 6, 14 weeks)
6. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 4, 7 weeks)
7. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 7, 12 weeks)
8. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 19, 12 weeks)
9. Sara Bareilles, "Love Song" (LW No. 8, 27 weeks)
10. Jesse McCartney, "Leavin'" (LW No. 14, 2 weeks)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 1, 8 weeks)
2. Ashanti, "The Way That I Love You" (LW No. 4, 12 weeks)
3. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 3, 13 weeks)
4. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 2, 13 weeks)
5. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 7, 9 weeks)
6. Rick Ross feat. T-Pain, "The Boss" (LW No. 5, 17 weeks)
7. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 10, 10 weeks)
8. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 6, 17 weeks)
9. Keyshia Cole, "I Remember" (LW No. 8, 27 weeks)
10. 2 Pistols feat. T-Pain and Tay Dizm, "She Got It" (LW No. 9, 16 weeks)

Hot Country Songs
1. James Otto, "Just Got Started Lovin' You" (LW No. 2, 29 weeks)
2. George Strait, "I Saw God Today" (LW No. 1, 13 weeks)
3. Taylor Swift, "Picture to Burn" (LW No. 4, 17 weeks)
4. Trace Adkins, "You're Gonna Miss This" (LW No. 3, 22 weeks)
5. Brad Paisley, "I'm Still a Guy" (LW No. 6, 11 weeks)
6. Phil Vassar, "Love Is A Beautiful Thing" (LW No. 5, 27 weeks)
7. Rascal Flatts, "Every Day" (LW No. 7, 11 weeks)
8. Lady Antebellum, "Love Don't Live Here" (LW No. 8, 31 weeks)
9. Kenny Chesney, "Better as a Memory" (LW No. 10, 7 weeks)
10. Carrie Underwood, "Last Name" (LW No. 9, 8 weeks)

Hot Modern Rock Tracks
1. Weezer, "Pork & Beans" (LW No. 3, 3 weeks)
2. Seether, "Rise Above This" (LW No. 1, 11 weeks)
3. Flobots, "Handlebars" (LW No. 5, 5 weeks)
4. Puddle of Mudd, "Psycho" (LW No. 2, 27 weeks)
5. Atreyu, "Falling Down" (LW No. 4, 15 weeks)
6. The Raconteurs, "Salute Your Solution" (LW No. 6, 6 weeks)
7. Linkin Park, "Given Up" (LW No. 8, 9 weeks)
8. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" (LW No. 9, 7 weeks)
9. 3 Doors Down, "It's Not My Time" (LW No. 7, 11 weeks)
10. Disturbed, "Inside the Fire" (LW No. 11, 6 weeks)

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.

This week, Your Boy assesses a publication that saw its first issue in 1952, and is thus much older than all but one assessed in this space; it's been an irreducible part of the pop music conversation since.

The New Music Express initially fulfilled for the United Kingdom the same function as Billboard in the U.S. until the early '60s, when British music took the rest of the world by storm and it was changed into a consumer publication. In terms of longevity and influence, NME can only be compared to Rolling Stone, but that's where the similarities begin and end. It remains a newspaper (a format RS forewent in the late '70s) and the fact that it can be effectively distributed throughout the UK every week reflects that the British Isles are easier to traverse than the United States: NME could thus report on events pertinent to its readership in a timely manner.

For three decades, NME competed fiercely with Melody Maker (est. 1926) and Sounds (est. 1971). In the second half of the 20th century, popular music was the UK's most consistently vital culture product, and this vigorous environment supported three weekly papers. But Sounds folded in 1991, and NME subsumed Melody Maker in 2000.

NME has long functioned in the U.S. as a crib sheet for terminally anglophilic music fans and as a pre-blog era example of how writers in their twenties can get comically overheated when they discover an exciting new band. More recently, its Web site has become renowned for running with every music-oriented rumor that emerges out of the murk, often without a shred of verification (in this, the site is kin to the English tabloid newspapers collectively known as Fleet Street). But in the UK, the paper is perennial: there is the Queen, Cliff Richard, lager, chip butties, and the New Music Express.

Your Boy purchased his first copy in 1989, decided he didn't like it, decamped for Q, and thus didn't purchase another issue until earlier this week. His efforts to decode NME's shifting priorities over six decades would not result in terribly reliable analysis, so he'll begin 'splainin' what he understands as the paper's traits from when he started started paying attention...

It seemed that in the late '80s, NME's brain trust was keen on "the vanguard" of whichever moment pop music found itself. Being that this was the Thatcher/Major era, there was a keen sense of opposition to established rock stars amongst young turks (the term "rockism" had been coined by various English writers a few years earlier), and so idioms like the English version of indiepop, acid/house/rave, shoegaze, and goddamn grebo music were all championed by writers and editors who were probably just out of university and thus eager to demonstrate their spittle-flecked, quasi-socialist solidarity with this revolutionary musical movement or that.

But then came the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. Here was a genuine mass "youf" movement, one that briefly seemed to wash away Sting and Dire Straits forever. Then came Nirvana and Pearl Jam, of whom NME could pretend the same. Then, almost as a gift from the gods for English guys who might have regretted advocating American bands that could seem like Boston and Bob Seger with more distortion, came the big summer of 1995.

Blur vs. Oasis was a great story for the British media: its emphasis on the clash of Northern and Southern cultures in Britain made YB think how fun it would have been if Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Talking Heads sustained a red state and blue state-based war of words. England seemed like the center of the universe for NME and its readership, and them with no dog in that hunt would be forgiven for thinking that the paper's cheerleading gave off a whiff of nativism. By the time the dust settled, NME looked up to notice that Tony Blair was now Prime Minister, and railing against the canon seemed out of step with Cool Britannia. If rooting for the Spice Girls would be out of the question, then promoting the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim would do. NME would now, as English folks might say, be "havin' it."

By 2001, NME had recovered from its Britpop binge and found another movement it could go bananas for. The Real Rock bands! The Strokes! The White Stripes! The Hives! That really rather shitty Australian band the Vines! The paper's advocacy of these artists reflected two essential truths about NME in the last 20 years:

1. When NME gets in the tank for an artist, said artist will be covered with all the thoughtful restraint of a St. Bernard slobbering all over a giggling kindergartner.

2. NME will tip its hat to dance music and hip-hop, but nothing will ever replace guitar bands in its heart; that archetype, after all, is the greatest gift British culture has given the world in the past 50 years.

The Strokes in particular have been key to NME: they could have been made up over the phone by a couple of British rock writers dreaming up a perfect "New York Guitar Band," and NME has since idealized Williamsburg, Brooklyn (the neighborhood's rise as a hipster paradise is contiguous with that of Julian Casabalancas and his four fine feathered friends). And the two English acts that NME has championed most fervently over the past five years, the Libertines and Arctic Monkeys, are more or less homegrown iterations of the Strokes.

And so Your Boy comes to the April 26, 2008 edition of NME. There ain't much to it. Nearly a third of its 66 pages is devoted to ads for festivals and concert venues: YB thinks it would be wonderful if major music publications in the US could subsist on such ad revenue. The front-of-book section evokes NME.com by making hay with what's evidently the first interview with Paramore since its frontgal wrote a blog post that shook the world and the fact that "Noel and Liam Refuse To Drink Together." The "Live" section reveals that Staff Writer Mark Beaumont can travel through time to the year 2012, since he reviews a Muse concert at the Royal Albert Hall that's dated "Saturday, May 12." Similarly, Alan Woodhouse's review of a Hard Fi/Carbon Silicon gig near Nashville is datelined "Sunday, April 12."

The issue is devoted to, as per its big cover line, "The Future 50: The bands, artists and innovators driving music forward." Editor Conor McNicholas declares in his editor's letter that "the dominant of skinny-jean, vest-wearing jangly indie boys is coming to end," and that it's time for something new. YB wonders if Mr. McNicholas will be putting his money where his mouth is when, say, a new Interpol album is at the ready.

The entire feature well is devoted to the "Future 50." The list begins with stage-garb and prop designers Nova Dando and Petra Storrs, and whizzes through Spank Rock at 45, perpetual recipient of English-pop-writer-affection Mike Skinner at 37, the guitar-band-subsidizing Canadian government at 19, Canadian cover duo the Crystal Castles (who appear on the issue's cover) at 10, and the inevitable Alex Turner, Damon Albarn, Radiohead, and M.I.A. at 9, 8, 3 and 2, respectively.

NME's pick for the individual who is pushing popular music forward is... Dave Sitek. Why? He's a member of TV on the Radio and the producer of Scarlett Johansson's new album Anywhere I Lay My Head, which is comprised of songs by bobo fave Tom Waits, and the Foals' Antidotes. Anything else, NME scribe identified as "GC" who may be Assistant Gig Guide Editor Greg Cochrane? Well, he lives in Brooklyn ("currently the creative centre of the universe; home to the most exciting bands and artists on the planet right now, all making intellectual music that values creativity over celebrity," drools Cochrane), thinks most current pop music sucks, and describes his production aesthetic is reached by "sitting in my underwear, doing bong hits.'"

NME thinks this guy is pushing music forward more than any individual on Earth? Of course they do!

COCOA TEA
A cheerful rallying cry by this 49-year-old hit No. 40 on last week's Hot Singles Sales chart and is reportedly even more popular in Kenya; on his MySpace page he spells it "Barak Obamaha." He also lists, among his influences, "the gerat bob Marley," "gregorey issacc," "sam cook," and "stevee wonder," and appears somewhat ambivalent about the spelling of his own name as well, but so what, I can't spell in Jamaican either. An entertaining morsel from his bio: "...the 5feet 5inches rasta man who after not making it big from his first recording decide to try his hand at horse riding went to caymanas park race track where he started learning the rigors of being a jockey,but after been disloged several times by a horse called sovering set and been told to remount again after bleeding from wounds that was cause by the spills he recieved, started having second thaughts about his ability to master the trade,he went home deciding to try another occupation so he started learning to ply his trade on the high seas, his time spent learning to fish was historic and event full but all in all he had a good time doing so and never regret a moment of it because he develope the art of writing a song and kept working hard at prparing himself for the chance of getting to record a song again so he went to every dance..." And the rest is history. Both the video for "Barack Obama" and the song "Keep On Dancing" on his MySpace demonstate that Cocoa Tea has no lack of goofy sidekicks even more Flavor Flav than himself. Among the incisive political wisdom he imparts: "This is not Hillary Clinton/And it is not John McCain/ It is not Chuck Norris/And I know it's not John Wayne." Another verse advocates uniting races, including "the Japanese and all the Chiney man." Though he does promise at one point to "paint the White House black," a sentiment George Clinton will probably still appreciate.



GERALD VEASLEY
The cover of his current album Make Your Move suggests that this Philadelphia "Nu-Jazz/Funk/Jazz" bassist and apparent longtime fusion veteran may well play a mean, albeit well-mannered, game of chess—possibly even including castling and everything! Of the six tunes on his MySpace page, "Thank You" is by far the funkiest seeing how it's a cover of a famous Sly Stone song, and "Three Tears" the most melodically Bacharach/David-like. But oddly the page does not include "Slip N Slide," which has nothing to do with Trick Daddy's record label but which entered the Smooth Jazz Songs chart at No. 30 last week regardless. MySpace pal Elle claims the tune has a "nice little 'twang'" to it. Longo III is even more excited: "holy cow!! you have a myspace!? this is awsome! your camp this year was the bomb diggity!!! i'm looking foreward to next year as long as i'm not going to iraq!! The "camp" would seem to be Gerarld's "Bass Bootcamp" in Reading, Pa., which features dogtags of its own.

LETTUCE
More funky jazz funk! And their brand-new album—this week's No. 115 Heatseeker—is called Rage! Which is weird, because lettuce is just about the least raging vegetable ever. Maybe they're Raging Against the Rabbits. Or the Vegans. Oh wait, here's an explanation, from bassist Erick "E.D." Coomes: "We called the record Rage! because that's what we do. We're ragers and that's how we got started ... by raging." So there you go. Based in the Big Apple, they have either seven or eight members depending which part of their MySpace you believe. Like Gerald Veasley, they cover a '70s funk classic—in Lettuce's case, Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up," with Dwele competently adding falsetto soul vocals. I also like the photo where the long-haired-and-bearded member named Jesus is shown praying.

DEBBIE ROCKER
The Debster, whose spiritually titled Pedometer Plus: Intermediate Level re-entered the New Age album chart at No. 14 last week, has a "passion for changing people's lives, not just their bodies," her WALKVEST®'s web page claims. Among those celebrities whose lives-not-just-bodies the NYC-born/L.A.-bred world-record cyclist has assisted: Ellen Barkin, Valerie Bertinelli, Rachel Hunter, and Rod Stewart, plus countless more whose names I don't recognize, probably because I wasn't paying attention. What exactly this has to do with Debbie's undoubtedly rocking if undeniably pedestrian music, if she has any, is not exactly clear, though if you search her CD title on Amazon you'll find it associated with a certain "Walking Fit Kit." YouTube videos, for their part, deal with "cardio endurance." Suggested cover versions: "I Walk The Line," "Walk Don't Run," "Walk This Way."



THE WHITE TIE AFFAIR
Hey fellas, wouldn't naming our album Walk This Way invite damning comparisons to Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C. and Debbie Rocker? Well, maybe not if we put a shapely pair of lady's legs with yellow Converse high-tops on the cover! Great idea! And how about if we wear ties on our MySpace page, but not white ones? That'll confuse 'em! Also, how about if we include lots of "widgets"; you've heard of those, right? Like, we could have a teensy little chat room with scintillating dialogue such as: "sulman_lateef: hello / sulman_lateef: how are you all / sulman_lateef: any body there / mehran: hi / sulman_lateef: asl / rajpans7: hi"! And we could sell a "White Tie Affair Bundle," featuring our No. 44 Heatseeker-this-week album, an "instant download of the smash single 'Mr. Right,'" an "awesome slim fit T-shirt," and "TWTA knock arounds," all for $17.99, for a limited time only! I don't know what "knock arounds" are, but we'll put a picture of sunglasses there, just in case! Maybe nobody will even realize that we're sick-and-tired-of-being-sick-and-tired (as we whimper in our lead MySpace track) emo-with-synth wimps from Chicago! As of Wednesday, at least 38 of the 50 comments visible on our MySpace page came from girls! That's 76 per cent! How dreamy of us!

DESTROY THE RUNNER
The title of their album—Heatseeker No. 25 last week and No. 144 this week—is I, Lucifer, clearly a lie since the devil would never whine like a bootlicking Clear Channel screamo mollycoddle, and nor would he think it clever to identify his genre as "Experimental/ Metal/Reggaeton" on his MySpace page. Also, Bob Seger already told us he was Lucifer, way back in 1970. (Amazing song. Reached No. 84 in the Hot 100; did better in Detroit.) Interesting, though, that one of this San Diego band's MySpace friends is named Adam, possibly of Garden of Eden temptation fame: "Great album, guys. Screw the haters, they don't understand that bands change and evolve." A friend calling himself matronmali celtim begs to differ: "Ahh, disappointment at its finest. You won't be seeing me at any of your shows." Now Brvce: "I love love love love the new cd but not in a gay way." Mark, for his part, gets specific about the music's evolution: "from a kind of generic sounding rock/screamo band to something I had no clue as to what to compare it to." Me neither!

ARSIS
Cover art on We Are The Nightmare features two goop-drippingly horned hobgoblins from the black lagoon sticking their skinny fingered tentacles into some poor bald sap's mouth, all surrounded with seaweed; the album entered Heetseekers at No. 22 last week, and slips to No. 56 a week later. The band's logo is sneakily constructed to resemble a palindrome, even though it isn't one. Music—"melodic death metal" from Virginia—thrashes in a tolerably wankful way until the singer starts barfing. Opening seconds of title track and intermittent instrumental interludes thereafter demonstrate that Arsis conform to the decades-old tradition of extreme metal bands being more skilled at being beautiful than being noisy. Best song title on MySpace: "Lust Before the Maggots Conquer," because once they conquer, who'll have time for lust, right? Comment from Black Johnny, about their DVD: "Great shit. Who was the guy with the box on his head running in the field? Who ever that was is my hero. Have fun with your wine ha ha."

1. Having been shrunk to microscopic size, I am accidentally inhaled by Antony and must cling to his moist uvula during a concert tribute to Lou Reed's Mistrial at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music. I dare not let go, lest I fall down his esophagus. Despite the deafening warbling that surrounds me, I can still hear Vampire Weekend's sprightly rendition of "The Original Wrapper." Occasionally, Antony's mouth opens wide enough that I can see Brian Eno (in full Roxy uniform), blowing into a melodica as a big-suited David Byrne shouts about "Video Violence." Rufus Wainwright and Elton John see how many notes they can fit into "Don't Hurt A Woman," while Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson lock tongues backstage. During the closing all-star performance of "Tell It To Your Heart," Antony hits a high C and I am finally flung from his trembling uvula, falling into the chasm below.

2. Brian Baker, Jeff Nelson and Lyle Preslar force Ian MacKaye to rejoin Minor Threat for the 2008 Warped Tour, in order to pay back royalties that MacKaye does not believe he owes. MacKaye is legally enjoined from stopping songs to call out moshers, or to announce that the festival, the advertisers or anything else, is "bullshit." I am working for Getback.com, handing out fliers to the parents of festival attendees. I have been told that if I can't get Ian to sign over the rights to "Salad Days" for the company's TV ad campaign ("Do you remember when? Yeah, well so do we!") my family will be killed.

3. I'm stuck in a world where indie rock has slowly transformed from amateurish, enthusiastic rock with zine-fueled anticonsumerist, small-community leanings, to anonymous art-folk twaddle by musicians who can think of no greater accomplishment than getting their song into a phone ad or winning a PLUG Award. And I can't wake up.

In The NME Office: Indie Dreaming... [NME]

Unfamiliar names bubble up on the Billboard singles charts all the time. But usually those names are first encountered in the charts' lower reaches—not way up in the top 10, especially on a chart as slow-moving as Hot Modern Rock Tracks, and especially for a song that strays from the modern rock format. Which is part of why it was so intriguing to find "Handlebars" by the Flobots at No. 7 in only its third week on the chart. To give you an idea of how fast that rise is, the Raconteurs' "Salute Your Solution" reached the same spot in the same amount of time on the chart just a week before it. And that song had the benefit of being by an established band with a previous chart-topper, as well as an insta-release gimmick for its latest album that probably encouraged radio programmers to add the single quickly. Oh yeah, and the Raconteurs are a rock band through and through, tailor-made for the format, while the Flobots are a rap group.

Being that they're on the Modern Rock chart and nowhere to be seen on the hip-hop/R&B charts, the Flobots are pretty obviously not peers of, say, Rick Ross. They're not a crew of MCs, but rather a hip-hop band in The Roots mold—two rappers backed by live musicians—and they're from Denver. And "Handlebars" sounds, well... about like you'd probably expect a white (mostly white?) hip-hop band from Denver to sound like. The verses feature a stiff but slightly impressive double-time flow, and the song builds to an intense crescendo, as the lyric's seemingly innocent theme becomes gradually more sinister and, in a vague, wishy washy way, politically conscious. It's not hard to see why the 'twist' of the song has hooked radio listeners so quickly, even if it sounds like a really toothless cover of an unreleased Rage Against The Machine song to these ears. "Handlebars" first appeared on an independent EP in 2005, and was re-released on the band's major-label debut Fight With Tools over six months ago, which makes the song's very recent, very rapid ascendance even more surprising.

The meteoric rise of the Flobots gives me a good opportunity to talk about alt-rock radio's strange, unpredictable relationship with hip-hop, and the queasy race issues that go along with it. If alternative rock is at all still counter-culture enough to be considered an "alternative" to anything, it's hip-hop and its influence in pop and R&B, which has become increasingly pervasive over the past two decades. And outside of the "everything but rap and country" demographic that may or may not be comprised mainly of strawmen, odds are most of the people listening to rock radio like at least some hip-hop. So it becomes more of a question of what kind of rap they want to hear alongside their guitar-toting favorites, and how much of it they'll tolerate.

Modern rock radio has frequently shown love to songs that feature rapping, and to artists of color, but rarely at the same time. The notable exception to that rule is the aforementioned Rage ATM, whose '90s hits to this day remain a format staple, reliably dispensing fist-pumping anger like a cash machine every afternoon. But they were a racially diverse band that played hard rock with hip-hop elements. More traditional hip-hop acts have had a much spottier history. Outkast's "Hey Ya!" hit No. 16 on Modern Rock at the peak of its word-conquering ubiquity, but that was, of course, a guitar-driven pop song that just happened to be by one half of a veteran rap group. Cypress Hill, the Latino rap group beloved by every white pot smoker I knew in high school, who headlined Lollapalooza and whose "Insane In The Brain" got as much play on Alternative Nation as on Yo! MTV Raps, only hit the Modern Rock chart with later singles that deliberately catered to the format: "(Rock) Superstar" and the Clash-sampling "What's Your Number?" Few hip-hop acts were ever as popular with white rock fans as Public Enemy, but Chuck D only achieved rock airplay with his comically vapid guest appearance on Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing." And there were a number of more recent rap hits that I'd heard on rock stations here and there, and was surprised to find no Modern Rock history for whatsoever: Jay-Z's "99 Problems," The Roots' "The Seed 2.0," even the Gym Class Heroes' "Cupid's Chokehold."

Otherwise, the history of rapping on rock radio is lily white. The Beastie Boys became mainstays of alternative radio in the early '90s, just as they were becoming irrelevant to hip hop audiences. Eminem scraped the lower reaches of the Modern Rock top 20 with three of his biggest hits. Funky honkies like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, 311, Cake, and Beck have all had long careers full of popular singles with and without rapping, while one-hit wonders like Crazy Town, the post-House of Pain Everlast, and the N.W.A.-covering Dynamite Hack have dropped rhymes on rock airwaves from time to time. The Barenaked Ladies and the Butthole Surfers both scored their only Modern Rock No. 1's ("One Week" and "Pepper," respectively) with songs that featured rapped verses.

Active rock stations have always allowed much less hip-hop influence to seep in, save for the most aggressive rap-rock hybrids like Limp Bizkit, most of whom went out of fashion years ago. And as I mentioned in my last column, even rap-metal survivors like Kid Rock and Linkin Park have stripped the staccato rhymes out of most of their recent hits, while Anthony Kiedis has aged, horrifyingly, into a balladeer. In general, alt-rock radio is more reliant on guitar rock now than at any point since the mid-'90s, right before ska-punk, "electronica," the swing revival, and McG videos came along and made things garishly bright, bouncy, and self-consciously eclectic. You might still hear "Paul Revere" or Sublime every hour on the hour on most alt-rock stations, but new hits from breaking artists generally tend to fall somewhere along the grunge/emo/nu-metal axis.

Without getting into a Sasha Frere-Jones-style debate about whether rock radio was better when it was a melting pot of racial diversity (or, at least, mostly white folks with diverse influences), there definitely appears to have been a tidal shift. And I'd previously assumed that there wouldn't be any significant rap crossover to Modern Rock happening in the foreseeable future, especially with the face of underground hip-hop increasingly turning toward hipster-friendly party rap along the lines of Spank Rock rather than the conscious rap that has historically connected more with white rock fans. In a way, the earnest, vaguely jam band-ish Flobots feel like a throwback to a strain of indie rap that's been on the wane since the beginning of the decade. Time will tell whether "Handlebars" sticks on the chart and yields follow-up hits, though. They may end up as just a brief, unusual blip on the Modern Rock landscape like Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae MC whose "King Without A Crown" peaked two years ago at No. 7—the same spot currently occupied by "Handlebars."

Babylon Dance Band, "When I'm Home"/"Remains Of The Beat" (Babylon Dance Band, 1981)
This is what indie rock could have sounded like, damn: A lively rhythm that actually propels the music forward (basslines and handclaps leading the guitars—reminds me of early '80s Georgia band Pylon); a lively vocal that actually sounds engaged rather than detached (an exasperated male semi-Southern drawl that winds up stretching and twisting vowels and exclaiming "whoo!"—reminds me of early '80s Georgia band the Brains.) Still, despite their name, not really a dance band, and not reggae either. Four collegiate-looking young people from Louisville; three clean-cut guys, one bespectacled girl. Tim Harris and Tara Key later wound up in Antietam, and BDB reunited for an album on Matador in 1994 that hardly anybody noticed; their MySpace now lists them as a New York band. On the 45 sleeve, in the same picture that wound up on the cover of The Village Voice back then, they're loading their instruments into their car. A-side's about having cabin fever: "When I'm home, I just bitch and moan." "When I'm home, I could be on the road, in an empty room, with just a telephone." B-side is faster, more urgent, with a guitar part that could be a sax part. And yeah—what remains of the beat here is a lot more than what would remain of it in indie rock only a few years later.

The Black Halos, "Jane Doe"/"Russian Roulette" (Sub Pop, 2000)
Their leather-clad photo on the cover has "glam sleaze" written all over it, which ten years earlier would have still meant "post- G'nR hair metal" (it all dates back to Hanoi Rocks or Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers anyway), but sometime in the '90s (D Generation maybe?) the look shifted back to meaning "punk," somehow. Anyway, a decent sloppy churn; doesn't necessarily convince me these Vancouver boys are afflicted with the social diseases their subgenre implies, and doesn't necessarily have to. But they do better with the B-side's power ballad than the would-be rocker on the A; the singer calls himself "a late-night thriller" and tries to rhyme "Viet nam" with "Superman" and what sounds like "Russian ryall" with either "vial" or "vile," either of which seems appropriate. Inside my copy there's a subscription order card for the Sub Pop Singles Club, and the next two on the schedule are by Dead C and Death Cab For Cutie—similar names, but kind of far apart regardless.

Blumfeld, "Draußen Auf Kaution"/"Jet Set" (Big Cat, 1995)
One of the only songs in my collection with the old German "ettsett" letter (signifying a double "s") in its title, so it's no surprise when the A-side kicks off with some car ignition, like this reportedly Kafka-inspired Hamburg band is about to fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn. That evolves into repeating guitar drones, and what's unexpected is how pretty and exquisitely lonely the drones and German accents turn from there, prefiguring a mood the Notwist would catch a few years later. My high-school-and-Army-base Deutsch helps me catch a few phrases: "um den strassen," "ich nicht," "nicht forgessen." The Nasty Little Man press release still tucked inside the sleeve says they were one of Steve Albini's favorite bands at the time, and yeah, they're partaking in a precise and severe aesthetic you can imagine him admiring. "Jet Set" speeds things up, matching the forward motion of one of Sonic Youth's less lethargic songs circa Sister, with vocals working hard Teutonic consonants against the rhythm. Nothing sloppy or social diseased about these guys, that's for sure.

Bona Roba, "Cunningham Park"/"The Slip" (Sonico, 2004)
As much a garage band as Black Halos, but from Queens, hence more middle-class strivers than bohemian slummers; they sound like they've rehearsed more and they ingest better drugs—namely, beer. They also sound like they really like the Rolling Stones a lot. On the picture sleeve, they're playing in a basement rec room or a neighborhood dive bar, with Brooklyn Brewery logos on the wall and ice machines behind them. "Cunningham Park," about fighting and fucking in the summer, makes the public space in its title sound legendary even though I've never heard of the place before. "The Slip" is more muffled but still Stonesey, and still full-throated, and with some harmonies—an Exile move maybe, though seeing how it's "recorded live to 4-track," you can't be completely sure.

Born Bavarian, "Fucking In The Butt"/"White Blue Trash" (Steel Cage, 2001)
Based in Germany, like Blumfeld, but Germany's deep South part, and I get the idea they drink more beer than Bona Roba too. Probably also not a great band to start a fight with: The photo inside the 45 sleeve shows singer Andi Nauerz wearing a Klan hood and cape, but it's plaid; guitarist Klaus Pelz has a CCCP hammer-and-sickle T-shirt. On the back cover, there's a big ugly bearded biker-looking dude named Rolan Betonohr Holler, who "died alone in the second part of July 2001," and the record is dedicated to him since he "did us the honor of entering the stage and singing the backing vocals of 'White Blue Trash' every fucking time we played a live version of that song'." The band is apparently from Munich, and the non-song on the A-side (credited songwritingwise to David Allan Coe, though I've got a bunch of his albums and it's sure not on any of those) is ferociously obscene and half-assed Motörhead/G.G. Allin cowpunk in which they threaten to "fuck the shit out of you." But the rousing chorus of "White Blue Trash" is where you can absolutely envision soused louts in the crowd hoisting their steins in the air and breaking bar stools over each others' heads just for the jolly sport of it: "We are White!" "We are Blue!" "We Are White! Blue! Trash!" I don't know what that slogan means from a racial perspective, and to be honest I'm not sure I want to know; I'm just going to assume they're proud to be working class on the weekend and leave it at that. And yeah, the verses are incomprehensible, but I double-dare you to say that to these guys' faces. At the end, guitar chords turn into "Sweet Home Alabama," totally at home away from home.

Broken Bottles, "Suburban Dream"/"Broken Bottles" (TKO, 2006)
Another Pleasant Valley Sunday, here in Status-Symbol Land: "Down the street/I'm in a band/We got the beat/The neighborhood watch is after us/White picket fence." Snide but poppish, the offspring of Green Day, from Southern California and they sound like it. Then, in Broken Bottles' theme song, Jess The Mess whines through his adenoids about how they got kicked out of an '80s bar and wound up drinking and breaking bottles in the street, and these kids thereby make their claim as true punks—skinny ones, and stupid ones maybe, but brave ones. "Like to dance to '80s [or 'ladies'?] music/Want to cause a problem." I wonder if the '80s bar is in the suburbs. I also bet they don't know how sad they sound.

Here's a trick question—look at the following Top 10 chart and guess how long ago it was compiled:

1. Colbie Caillat, "Bubbly" (Universal Republic)
2. Sara Bareilles, "Love Song" (Epic)
3. Michael Bublé, "Lost" (143/Reprise)
4. Fergie, "Big Girls Don't Cry" (will.i.am/A&M)
5. Timbaland ft. OneRepublic, "Apologize" (Mosley/Blackground)
6. Daughtry, "Home" (RCA)
7. Taylor Swift, "Teardrops on My Guitar" (Big Machine)
8. Pink, "Who Knew" (LaFace)
9. Michael McDonald, "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher" (Universal Motown)
10. Alicia Keys, "No One" (MBK/J)

You've probably figured it out already: that list was compiled this past week and is therefore absolutely current. Well, sort of. To be strict, it's Billboard's Adult Contemporary Tracks Top 10 for May 3, 2008, and the way some of these songs' other numbers shake out is worth looking at closely. The average A.C. Top 10 entry for this week has spent over half a year on the chart—27.2 weeks. Half of them are also in the current Top 40—and those five have been in the Hot 100 for significantly longer than they've been in the A.C. Top 30. Here's that list again, with the number of weeks each song has spent in the A.C. Top 30 in parentheses and, where applicable, the current position and number of weeks in the Hot 100 in brackets:

1. "Bubbly" (38 weeks) [No. 36; 43 weeks]
2. "Love Song" (15 weeks) [No. 8; 25 weeks]
3. "Lost" (15 weeks)
4. "Big Girls Don't Cry" (43 weeks)
5. "Apologize" (25 weeks) [No. 18; 38 weeks]
6. "Home" (50 weeks)
7. "Teardrops on My Guitar" (17 weeks) [No. 38; 46 weeks]
8. "Who Knew" (37 weeks)
9. "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher" (15 weeks)
10. "No One" (17 weeks) [No. 33; 33 weeks]

None of this is news, of course. The entire idea of the adult contemporary format is to act as a kind of strainer, filtering out the harsher, weirder elements of pop until what's left is smooth and can go down easy. Chart-watchers, commentators, and other folks whose job it is to be up to the minute can laugh at this list, and at the A.C. charts generally, as being old and out of it. But being anti-cutting edge is precisely its point. (That's why it's a Top 30 and not a Top 100, for starters.) "Bubbly" only took five weeks to make it to A.C., as opposed to 16 weeks for "No One" and 29 for "Teardrops on My Guitar"—maybe beats take longer to settle for A.C. listeners than they do for pop fans. (Ditto twang.)

This fascinates me in part because it's probably the closest of any of Billboard's charts to reflect the way a lot of people listen to music, and by "a lot" I mean "nearly everybody." One of Chris Molanphy's frequent points of discussion in "100 and Single" is how chart data is gathered and measured, and as interesting and frequently relevant that is to discussing the pop charts in general, it disintegrates in the face of the A.C. charts. However it's compiled (I'm guessing iTunes sales mean absolute zero; this is almost certainly 100 percent airplay), the Adult Contemporary list is probably the most accurate chart around, in that everything on it is over a year behind the other Billboard charts, and that it contains only songs your mom knows.

I mean no insult by that. Still, I'll understand if you think I did: music people tend toward the finicky like few other arts or entertainment followers. Partly that's due to the isolation most of us, superfans or not, enjoy most recorded music in. (The radio may mystically connect us all, but I'd wager that most of us listen to it unaccompanied.) Obviously that one-on-one aspect is an important part of its appeal; even on a packed dance floor or a crowded stadium, the idea that a particular song is speaking directly to us individually is what galvanizes an audience. (The more people who feel they're being directly spoken to, the bigger the galvanization, not to mention the bigger the audience.) But if people's relationship with music has grown more peculiar, that's largely because music has grown peculiar too—not because it's weird, but because there's simply too much of it to process easily.

Let me try it this way: For most people, music is akin to sports. Everyone knows the games, the rules, and the big teams; knowing anything beyond that is nitpicking. You can, week to week, pay zero attention to the minor leagues, but no one's going to blink if you claim to love baseball. It's perfectly OK to refer to a player who's spent four years in AA and AAA ball before climbing into the majors as "new." In this realm, the idea is to get to the majors and shine; it isn't to make a life's goal out of pitching middle relief for 12 seasons in Pawtucket.

This reckoning, of course, has nothing to do with how music actually works. In sports, a tiered system like baseball's major and minor leagues presents an accurate reflection of talent and ability, for the most part. In music, those distinctions are arbitrary: the band you can see at a local dive can be as good as the one headlining an arena, and if you care at all you probably want to keep tabs on both camps and many points between. (Especially if you're a genre specialist.) In music, all the leagues—major, minor, even foreign when we tune those in—exist on a level field, and there's a lot more of them, too. In this scenario, the Pawtucket middle reliever's life goal is both nobler and more commonplace—and given the vagaries of the marketplace, just as elusive as jumping to the bigs and snagging Rookie of the Year.

So right—my analogy went too far. Forgive me. Anything was better than actually listening to "Bubbly" and Bublé.

As predicted last week, Lil Wayne, supported by the late Static Major, has hit the top of Billboard's Hot 100 with "Lollipop." For longtime Weezy fans, it's a bit of a Pyrrhic victory—the first great rapper of the Web 2.0 era hemming in his flow to score a big hit. But nine years after his emergence on the Juvenile classic "Back That Azz Up," it's still a bit of a thrill to see Wayne's name gracing the top of the charts.

It's not only Weezy's first No. 1 but also his first Top 10 as a lead artist and, amazingly, his first trip to the top slot in 20 chart entries (21 if you include the Hot Boys' 2000 single "I Need a Hot Girl"). Prior to this, he'd never ascended any higher than No. 3 with his supporting performance on Destiny's Child's "Soldier."

How long he stays at No. 1 will depend on whether "Lollipop" settles in as a viral hit a la "Crank That" or "Low"—and on the competition percolating below him. The Top 10 is as fluid as it's been since last summer, which makes things fun for your humble chart columnist.

Weezy is the second act in the past month to evict "Bleeding Love" by Leona Lewis from the top slot, and he might not be the last. After Wednesday's well-received American Idol performance, digital sales of "Bleeding" have exploded again; it's the top-seller on iTunes as of this writing, meaning it could hit No. 1 for the third time next week. (After her initial week at No. 1 in March, Lewis gave way to Mariah Carey's "Touch My Body" for two weeks; that song currently holds on at No. 5.)

In a one-on-one contest between Wayne and Lewis next week, it's hard to say who would prevail. "Lollipop" continues to grow in airplay, but so does "Bleeding"; those are now the fifth and sixth most-played songs on U.S. radio, respectively. The bottom-line question is, is his airplay far enough ahead of hers that next week, when she outsells him on iTunes, he can overcome her download advantage?

One other observation: I mentioned last week that, among upwardly mobile hits, only Wayne's and Mariah's are enjoying airplay—and, hence, a chart boost—from both Top 40 and R&B/hip-hop radio. (Actually, I spoke too soon: Jordin Sparks and Chris Brown are getting a boost from R&B radio too. "No Air" moves into the R&B chart's Top 10 this week.)

The interesting question is, Why isn't Leona Lewis getting R&B radio airplay, too? This might sound like a stupid question—"Bleeding Love" is an adult-contemporary ballad sung by a British gal and written by two lily-white teen heartthrobs.

But being British didn't hold back Lisa Stansfield and her lily-white production team back in 1990. And speaking of 1990, let's ask another question: Is Lewis the new Mariah, or isn't she? Carey's crossover to black radio isn't a recent phenomenon—starting with "Vision of Love," Sony Music's major coup was selling Carey as biracial (which, ahem, she is) and getting her on R&B radio right away. Moving back to 2008, "Bleeding Love" is nowhere to be found on the entire 100-position, airplay-dominated Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. For her part, Lewis is the child of a Guyanese-Caribbean father and an Anglo-Welsh mother, which gives her arguably as much claim to a biracial heritage as the half-Venezuelan, half-Irish Carey.

Just saying: If I were on the Sony/BMG team breaking Lewis in America, I'd be a little worried about the total lack of crossover exposure she's getting. Once these industry pigeonholes are established, they're usually molded in concrete, and no matter how "soulful" Lewis's future projects are, she might face an uphill battle to be accepted on R&B radio.

Here's a rundown of the rest of this week's charts:

• I keep talking about Madonna's latest single, even while it muddles around the middle of the Top 10—it crawls back up to No. 6 this week—because its chart performance has been an interesting case of the sales-vs.-airplay paradox.

Madge's "4 Minutes" returns to the top of the Digital Songs chart, selling another 186,000 copies; since its first full week of sales, it has never placed lower than second on the list of buck-a-song downloads. But its radio numbers are still huffing and puffing to catch up. It's now ranked 16th in airplay, up from 27th last week—one of its best weeks of radio growth, but that still leaves her at a handicap to the five records above her on the Hot 100. It's a reminder that even now, in these iTunes-centric times, radio still matters.

It's also an interesting sign of how the mighty have fallen. In the '80s and '90s, Madonna was what Top 40 programmers used to call an "instant add," with each new single a no-brainer for playlist rotation. Now, Madge has to prove herself track by track like everyone else, and programmers are still warming to the ditty even while fans buy it in droves.

We'll probably still be talking about "4 Minutes" in the weeks to come, because I expect it to see an iTunes sales surge when Hard Candy, her new album, drops. If her airplay keeps growing, that burst of sales might finally propel the song to No. 1.

• The biggest mover in the Top 40 this week is the latest single by John Mayer, "Say," which vaults to No. 12 from No. 35. "Say" has actually been out since last fall, when Mayer released it on the soundtrack to the geezer flick The Bucket List. So what accounts for this belated explosion? (Bucket isn't even out on DVD yet.) You can thank, or blame, reality TV. Mayer performed the tune a couple of weeks ago on Dancing with the Stars—and in the first full week after that performance "Say" sold 92,000 downloads, a jump of 131%. But it'll be a while before Mayer's ditty is polluting your brain, "Daughters"-style, at the grocery store: "Say" only ranks 65th in radio airplay.

• Country demigod George Strait scores his 43rd No. 1 hit with "I Saw God Today." That's a record for most No. 1 hits, beating out... George Strait, who surpassed Conway Twitty's 40 No. 1's back in 2006 and has been padding his total ever since. As I remind readers from time to time, the Hot Country list is all-airplay. In case you're curious, on the all-genre Hot 100, "Saw God" ranks at No. 33, mostly thanks to all that country radio exposure; he only sold about 12,000 downloads of the song last week.

• For the first time since last August, the Modern Rock Top 10 contains no Foo Fighters songs, as two of Dave Grohl's former No. 1 smashes simultaneously fall out of the winners' circle. The recent hit "Long Road to Ruin" tumbles to No. 12 from No. 4, while the deathless "The Pretender," which spent 36 of its 38 chart weeks in the Top 10, finally falls to No. 13. I would have loved to have told you that there were no Foos songs and no Linkin Park songs on that list, but just this week, the fourth Top 10 hit from LP's Minutes to Midnight, "Given Up," moves up to No. 8. For a Fooless, Linkinless Top 10, you'd have to go all the way back to April 2007.

Top 10s
Last week's position and total weeks charted in parentheses:

Hot 100
1. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 2, 6 weeks)
2. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 1, 10 weeks)
3. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 3, 16 weeks)
4. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 4, 10 weeks)
5. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 5, 10 weeks)
6. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 7, 5 weeks)
7. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 6, 12 weeks)
8. Sara Bareilles, "Love Song" (LW No. 9, 25 weeks)
9. Chris Brown, "With You" (LW No. 8, 21 weeks)
10. Miley Cyrus, "See You Again" (LW No. 11, 21 weeks)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 1, 11 weeks)
2. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 2, 11 weeks)
3. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 3, 6 weeks)
4. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 5, 15 weeks)
5. Keyshia Cole, "I Remember" (LW No. 4, 25 weeks)
6. Ashanti, "The Way That I Love You" (LW No. 8, 10 weeks)
7. Rick Ross feat. T-Pain, "The Boss" (LW No. 7, 15 weeks)
8. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 12, 7 weeks)
9. Alicia Keys, "Like You'll Never See Me Again" (LW No. 9, 26 weeks)
10. J. Holiday, "Suffocate" (LW No. 10, 29 weeks)

Hot Country Songs
1. George Strait, "I Saw God Today" (LW No. 2, 11 weeks)
2. Trace Adkins, "You're Gonna Miss This" (LW No. 1, 20 weeks)
3. James Otto, "Just Got Started Lovin' You" (LW No. 3, 27 weeks)
4. Taylor Swift, "Picture to Burn" (LW No. 5, 15 weeks)
5. Phil Vassar, "Love Is A Beautiful Thing" (LW No. 6, 25 weeks)
6. Brad Paisley, "I'm Still a Guy" (LW No. 8, 9 weeks)
7. Rascal Flatts, "Every Day" (LW No. 9, 9 weeks)
8. Chris Cagle, "What Kinda Gone" (LW No. 4, 40 weeks)
9. Lady Antebellum, "Love Don't Live Here" (LW No. 11, 29 weeks)
10. Carrie Underwood, "Last Name" (LW No. 12, 6 weeks)

Hot Modern Rock Tracks
1. Seether, "Rise Above This" (LW No. 2, 9 weeks)
2. Puddle of Mudd, "Psycho" (LW No. 1, 25 weeks)
3. Atreyu, "Falling Down" (LW No. 3, 13 weeks)
4. The Raconteurs, "Salute Your Solution" (LW No. 7, 4 weeks)
5. 3 Doors Down, "It's Not My Time" (LW No. 6, 9 weeks)
6. The Bravery, "Believe" (LW No. 5, 29 weeks)
7. Flobots, "Handlebars" (LW No. 15, 3 weeks)
8. Linkin Park, "Given Up" (LW No. 13, 7 weeks)
9. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" (LW No. 10, 5 weeks)
10. Disturbed, "Inside the Fire" (LW No. 11, 4 weeks)

So, according to Crain's New York Business, only one of the four magazines regularly assessed in this space showed any ad growth in the first quarter of 2008: Spin Magazine, which by some estimates should be the one of the four most vulnerable to the various depredations of the Internet: indie rock fans under 25 seemed long ago to settle into the multifarious fora where they could argue endlessly over the relative merits of Modest Mouse and Built to Spill.

But Keyboard Krybaby guesses that Spin's brain trust must have embraced the Pitchfork model, or at least accepted that its core purpose is to cover indie-rock musicians. "Let the competition try to be all things to all people," the thinking would go, "and we will appeal to readers who identify heavily—almost exclusively—with middle-class bohemians playing housebroken variations of different kinds of rock and roll music of the past thirty years."

The current indie rock Diaspora often reminds KK of the folk boom of the early '60s: collegiate and post-collegiate artists and audiences congratulating themselves for their rugged independence and purity of intent while seldom evincing interest or otherwise having contact with anyone different from themselves. As much as Rolling Stone, Blender and various "Jack" stations wouldn't like it, most self-identified music fans aren't generalists: the prominence of Pitchfork and god-knows-how-many blogs suggest that indie rock fans burrow into their niche and are content to stay there. "I listen to tons of different kinds of music" is inaccurate self-flattery right up there with "I have no compunctions about voting a black man for president."

This is one of the reasons KK feels little kinship with indie-rock fans, but he certainly won't begrudge Spin a strategy for selling advertising that has worked in the first four months of 2008 (in his newfound spirit of transparency, KK should say that he worked a few feet away from the office of then-Blender and current Spin publisher Malcolm Campbell in 2002-2003). Whether or not this translates into success on the newsstand, KK cannot say, but cultivating accounts like Virgin America and Patron suggests that Spin's ad staff has convinced "lifestyle" advertisers that they're purchasing eyeballs.

In any case, the May 2008 Spin heralds the summer festival season: KK is fairly confident that hundreds of complimentary copies of this issue will contribute to untold thousands of pounds of garbage that custodians will remove from the site of Coachella this weekend. Like their hootenanny attending forebears 45 years ago, indie rock partisans love them some festivals!

Noted road dogs My Morning Jacket receive the imprimatur of Spin's cover. KK will take a moment here to say that, like the band, he comes from Louisville. When he was coming up, hardcore punk rock bands and then Squirrel Bait and Slint were the big comers—southern rock and country were signifiers of redneck-ism that most punk/college rock types there wished to avoid. So it's somewhat amusing that the most famous band currently from the town signifies the good ol' boy paradigm. As far as KK is concerned, take the Neil Young out of MMJ, replace it with Alice in Chains, and you're left with LATE '90S Louisville acoustic grunge band Days of the New.

If the preceding sounds like KK doesn't much care for MMJ, that would be correct. He's predisposed toward southern rock and country music, but MMJ (and Kings of Leon, for that matter) have always struck him as hugely dull. So while he's never quite understood why indie-rockers dig 'em, in the telling of John McAlley's "The James Gang," Jim James and his band of recent recruits seem amiable, if not hugely interesting. (McAlley correctly notes that "despite its reputation as the sour mash mecca of the South, Louisville is as centrally located as any city as there is in America," or, as a local writer put it once, "Louisville is a midwestern town with southern pretensions.")

In any case, the Summer of Live package proceeds with "the Crowd Pleasers," quick interviews with seven acts—Death Cab for Cutie, Tapes 'n Tapes, Flight of the Conchords, Nicole Atkins, No Age, Black Kids and Spiritualized—who expound on the festival experience. Most agree that "the hang" for festivalgoers is more important than the indignities of 45-minute sets with malfunctioning monitors.

Having apparently concluded his "the rock and roll experience of my youth was the last authentic one" series in this magazine, contributor David Browne weighs in on the surfeit of American indie-rock festivals in the next six months in "Outside Chance." Browne notes that too many festivals may spread many acts too thin, that this season seems to lack the big reunion of years past like the Pixies and Rage Against the Machine (KK thinks that his and Ms. Johnston's beloved Stone Pimple Toilets weren't gone long enough to qualify), and that many festival promoters are not utopian idealists (a contract for New Jersey's All Points West specifies that acts cannot play shows within 70 miles of the festival from the time it's announced until 90 days after its conclusion).

And now a quick word for Bob Mehr's "Unsatisfied," a profile which beats the drum for a reunion by one of the few holdouts of the alt-rock golden age: the Replacements. KK has sympathy for Mehr, since a.) his article appears at around the same time as an identically intended piece in Billboard.com and b.) he's at work on a book on the Replacements shortly after the publication of Jim Walsh's oral history of the band, All Over But the Shouting. That the evidence of this piece indicates that Mehr's prospective book, unlike Walsh's, will have input from Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson is cold comfort in a market for books that probably won't support two histories on this one band.

As an act of full journalistic disclosure, I should mention at the start of this installment of VHS or Beta that in the bitterly cold winter of early 2007, I performed one day's work on the production of My Blueberry Nights, the first English-language feature from world-renowned Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai (after two decades of acclaimed films like Chungking Express, So Happy Together, and In the Mood for Love).

I day-played for the mere sake of being able to boast in cocktail chatter that I worked on a Kar Wai film, and apparently I wasn't alone in wanting to have such a topic for polite conversation. Marquee names like Norah Jones, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman, David Strathairn, and, uh, Cat Power, no doubt felt a similar urge to imbibe Wong Kar Wai's secondhand-smoke brand of cool, too.

For if anything, Kar Wai is cool. Always in sunglasses, a smoke perpetually in hand, he absorbs and namechecks Western culture expertly. For those who asked me to sum up the man in a single sentiment, I explained, "He's the Haruki Murakami of cinema." Kar Wai's soundtracks are infused with choice selections, as meticulously pondered as the color palettes, costumes, and lingering shots of curlicues of protagonist smoke in his films. When first sitting through In the Mood for Love, how could you not be swept up by those FO-NET-ick-lee sung Portuguese numbers from Nat King Cole? (It's strangely fitting that Shigeru Umebayashi, whose music also appeared in that film, reappears here with a harmonica-led version of that lingering melody.)

One suspects that the opportunity to shoot in the states might also give the man a chance to fully indulge his love of American music (and hit more than a few record stores along the way). And the soundtrack for My Blueberry Nights namechecks Otis Redding, Ruth Brown, and, uh, Cat Power. Most of the interludes come courtesy of Ry Cooder, who since his soundtrack slide guitar work on 1968's Performance has shown he can conjure bottleneck incidental music in his sleep. And here, he really does. He also pads out the proceedings with two of his producer efforts (for Mavis Staples and Hello Stranger). Standout is Cassandra Wilson's ambient take on Neil Young's "Harvest Moon."

Alas, Ry Cooder's not the only sleepwalker during said Nights. "Living Proof" and "The Greatest," from Chan Marshall's most somnambulant album, The Greatest, get deployed throughout the film. As for her first on-screen appearance, in the liner notes, Kar Wai talks about Marshall visiting the set: "We got along great, and immediately fell to joking about how she could play... a part that then did not even exist. Come winter 2006, Chan re-visited the set, this time in front of the camera playing that very role we once laughed about." True, as it is pretty laughable to have the stilted Chan Marshall portray a Russian émigré ingénue, but this passage also gives the impression that Kar Wai came over to rub elbows with 'cool' celebrities himself.

For the most part, though, the secondary characters give the film its wee bit of gravity. These characters (played by Strathairn, Portman, and Weisz) are addictive personalities: drunks, card sharks, the lovelorn. In their brief time onscreen, they far outstrip the Law and Jones, whose passion is about as torrid as room-temperature vanilla ice cream. There are many other structural problems to the film, the most glaring being the naturally arising question: "What sort of road movie has only two stops on it?"

Throughout, it feels as if Wong Kar Wai is caught up in the veneer of the American myth, his camera merely capturing—yet ultimately unable to penetrate—the shiny surfaces. But what gives with that diner's perpetually uneaten blueberry pie? Given that Jones always passes out after eating a bite of it (it's when she's passed out that Law slips her the tongue), perhaps these blueberries are really just roofies.