Idolator

Claiming the organizers of this weekend's electronica jamboree Wild In The Country have been "unable to secure any staging, sound and lighting for the festival," Bjork pulled out of her headlining spot late Friday. The Knebworth-based fest has since announced its plans to continue without Iceland's Finest, wishing her all the best while noting that it would have been nice to hear about her problems a little bit sooner, and that they "have diligently provided all production requirements for all of the other acts appearing on this years line-up." Unless the festival's other acts, like Soulwax, Hercules & Love Affair, and The Field, start dropping out, maybe we can assume that the organizers were dragging their heels on whether she could bring a giant automated turkey that transformed into a fluorescent gondola or not. More »

Janet Jackson's Discipline took the top spot on this week's albums chart, selling 181,000 copies in its first week in stores. Which is a somewhat impressive number in recent-record-sales terms, but consider this: In October 2006, 20 Y.O. entered the chart at No. 2—and it sold 296,000 copies. Of course, trying to compare the recorded-music sales landscapes from then and now is like trying to compare a regular hunk of cheese to one that's been gnawed by a thousand disease-infested rats, but it's probably worth pointing out, given that I've heard "Feedback" a lot more in public than I heard that terrible song from 20 Y.O. that featured Khia and that served as the album's lead single. More »

I'm hardly alone in my feelings on the subject, but the pecuiliar British need to argue for "pop" as a semi-tangible aesthetic quality distinct from whatever is on the damn pop charts at the moment (and arguing incessantly about what that quality is, consensus being impossible) will never cease to confuse me as an American who's finally shaken most of the critical Anglophilia he picked up in the early part of this decade. But if most of these arguments at least follow a certain internal logic that may just be anathema to how I now understand the concept, this scatterbrained Guardian blog post on the subject is, to quote Idolator's Michaelangelo Matos, "not just some kind of bullshit, but every kind of bullshit," the rock critical equivalent of a flaming bridge collapse at rush hour, brought down by the weight of its indefensible arguments, unchecked rhetoric, and the kind of inscrutable aesthetic vision for a mass culture phenomenon like "pop music" that leads to statements like "I can't recall a single great pop single from the 90s": More »

The limerick meme mentioned last week
Is reaching a new kind of peak
Now London is calling
It might be appalling
If you have no patience for geeks. More »