Idolator

The front page of today's New York Times arts section was overtaken by yet another "whimsicial" music-related graph by Andrew Kuo, an artist who's been making inscrutable charts of his music-consumption habits for Times' readers perusal for a little over a year now. This time, the subject is the ever-popular topic of "songs of the summer." In it, we learn that he really enjoys Hotstylz' "Lookin Boy" and Lil Wayne; also, he has zero familiarity with Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" and thus has no opinion on it, a super-contrarian pose that leads me to believe that he either doesn't leave the house much or only visits bodegas whose ambient radio choices he approves of. (Or he's fibbing to be "funny," but let's give him the benefit of the doubt.) More »

After debuting in June with a Powerpointy exegesis on Bright Eyes' seven-night run in New York, the "artist and blogger" Andrew Kuo has been contributing charts to the New York Times' online music section pretty regularly. Kuo's charts are very pretty and would no doubt look quite nice framed in a Roche Bobois-designed room, but since about the third one they've hewn to a very strict theme: Indie-cognoscenti-approved music tastes (Vampire Weekend and R. Kelly oui!; Fat Joe and recent New Pornographers non!) that are shallow enough to be summed up in three words or so, scattered about the screen in increasingly inscrutable arrangements of lines, dots, circles, and home-accessory-ready colors. Inspired by Kuo's latest effort—"The Projected Longevity Of 2007's Top 10 Songs," in which he bravely posits that Panda Bear's "Bros" "will sound even better five years from now" than any other song he's heard this year^*—our own "artist and blogger," Jess Harvell, whipped up Idolator's official response to the person who may, in fact, be crafting the most annoying music criticism on the Internet (and you know that's saying a lot): More »