Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who's contributed to many of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of Spin:
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Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who's contributed to many of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of Spin:
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So the Spin Doctors are playing a free concert on my high school's football/soccer field next Tuesday night. Should I go? I should go, right? I mean, just reading the news item has already put "Two Princes" in my head, so I might as well go for the whole "exorcising two demons at once" value meal in the name of intrepid blogging. [Newsday]
As evidenced by the stack of USB turntables for sale at my local Costco this week, vinyl has reemerged in the mainstream, thanks to the appeal/illusion of the format's "warmer" sound and the resurrected idea that an album can be something large and pretty to show off to your friends. However, rising petroleum costs mean that the price of producing and distributing vinyl is only going to get higher. So how long will this particular form of fetishism last?
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Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who's contributed to many of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of Spin:
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There's hardly a month that goes by without a attempt at improving the way that music sounds. The problem is, nearly all these brilliant moves come from artists and producers. Do consumers really take fidelity into consideration when making the few music-purchasing decisions?
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Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who's contributed to many
This year has been a rough one for music magazines: their ranks are thinning, the business they're covering is becoming more notable for being one that's putting out a product people don't want to pay for than anything else, and now Crain's New York Business puts into numbers what anyone who picked up a music magazine probably noticed already: Ad pages at the big four magazines are down substantially from last year's tallies, even as the magazines are increasing their rate bases. (Only Spin has weathered the downturn, with its ad pages actually up 22% since 2007.) Why?
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Whether they're petroleum-based or digital downloads, singles remain pop's most fascinating format. Twice a week in Single Spin, a singles-focused twist on Second Spin, we'll take a look at a song, sound, scene, or star that we think deserves more than two lines and a Rapidshare link—whether it's CMT country, underground dance, unfriendly noise, or anything else served up one tune at a time. Today we listen to a return to form from a Finnish dub-techno master, a goofy jam from a trio of sloppy New York indie kids, and faux-reggae scourge Sean Kingston warbling through the Billy Joel songbook. Yes, you read that right.
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As part of Idolator's continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Idolator Critics' Poll editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. In this installment, he looks at an issue of Spin from 1990 that attempted to tell rock history through Top 35 lists:
If you saw my bulging shelves full of CDs, books, magazines, photocopies, and printouts, you might call me a collector. But I've never been entirely comfortable with the designation: even when I was 13 and deep into comic books, I wanted to read them more than I wanted to preserve them. Keeping them around was a fringe benefit. The same has been true with music magazines, but it wasn't always, which is what has lately driven me to eBay to find old copies of Spin. One of my favorite issues was cover-dated August 1990: Jim Morrison against a bubblegum-pink background on the cover. The headline: "35 Years of Rock'n'Roll." A subhead: "Top 35 Lists of Everything From Guitar Gods to Dead Rock Star Charts."
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In the current climate of ruthless blog scrutiny, good records can easily disappear with little or no press and supposedly major albums are forgotten within weeks of release. With that in mind, we bring you Second Spin, where we'll take a look at records that have either slipped between the hype cracks or re-evaluate albums after the press cycle has left them for dead. (The occasional just-released rave may sneak in there, too.) This time a compilation provides a look at the current crop of "pop-punk" bands escaping the attention of both the radio and the blogosphere.
Recently, I wrote a piece attempting to link various poppy, punkish bands like Be Your Own Pet and Times New Viking into some kind of subaltern united front for 2008. After finishing, I realized I had unconsciously slighted a large swathe of underground-ish pop-punk that's already all but been written off by my music hack peers, that I snubbed an entire scene to focus on a few semi-pop faves with a decent press push. I should have known better. Somewhere, 16-year-old Jess was drumming his fingers on a study hall desk in irritation that his grown self had seemingly forgotten these catchy, sweetly sardonic, seven-inch-friendly songs about girls, boys, and the dumb things they routinely do to one another, songs that made high school tolerable for many bespectacled kids left cursing the fates come prom time.
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And now it's time for another installment of Rock-Critically Correct, in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by an anonymous writer who's contributed to several of those titles—or maybe even all of them! After the click-through, he examines the most recent issue of Spin:
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The June 1990 issue of Spin is certainly a time capsule. The cover star is Lisa Stansfield, which greatly annoyed the mag's alt-leaning readers but is fine with me—Affection is one of my favorite albums ever, though "All Around the Girl" disqualifies it for the Cover Head Hall of Fame. The reviews section ("Edited by Jim Greer," it notes; Greer went on to play bass for Guided by Voices and then write a book about them in which Greer's time in the band is barely mentioned) features write-ups of albums by Nick Cave, Cowboy Junkies, Blue Aeroplanes, A Tribe Called Quest, Television Personalities, the House of Love, the Sundays, Ernie Isley, the Silos, Stone by Stone with Chris D., Tony Williams, and Loop; Frank Owen's "Singles" column takes on New York's John Cardinal O'Connor's condemnation of heavy metal and the flap over Chill Rob G's and Snap!'s competing versions of "The Power"; the contents page tells us the magazine has 98 pages, which is a good thing considering there are almost no page numbers on the actual pages themselves. (That Bob Guccione Jr. and his minimalist design sense!) But the main reason I tracked down this piece of nostalgia on eBay is that after seeing the Ludacris Area Codes Map, I remembered the "Hip-Hop Map of America" by Bob Mack, who would go on to edit the Beastie Boys' 'zine, Grand Royal. The full map, and some choice excerpts, below.
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Whether they're petroleum-based or digital downloads, singles remain pop's most fascinating format. Twice a week in Single Spin, a singles-focused twist on Second Spin, we'll take a look at a song, sound, scene, or star that we think deserves more than two lines and a Rapidshare link—whether it's CMT country, underground dance, unfriendly noise, or anything else served up one tune at a time. Today we listen to the latest grim banger from a Philadelphia hip-hop institution, a decidedly less grim groove from not-so-sunny London, a music critic delivering a mournful techno remix, and something totally, unexpectedly, ridiculously astounding: Andrew WK's new mash note to a TV roundtable legend (!), which comes complete with MP3 so you can download and boggle along.
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In the current climate of ruthless blog scrutiny, good records can easily disappear with little or no press and supposedly major albums are forgotten within weeks of release. With that in mind, we bring you Second Spin, where we'll take a look at records that have either slipped between the hype cracks or re-evaluate albums after the press cycle has left them for dead. (The occasional just-released rave may sneak in there, too.) This time we look at 51 tracks of "grindpop" from some Brooklyn art-punks, 20 tracks of grind minus the pop from two Seattle misanthropes, and 25 tracks of hardcore hip-hop from an ATLien with a very different definition of "grind."
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Whether they're petroleum-based or digital downloads, singles remain pop's most fascinating format. Twice a week in Single Spin, a singles-focused twist on Second Spin, we'll take a look at a song, sound, scene, or star that we think deserves more than two lines and a Rapidshare link—whether it's CMT country, underground dance, unfriendly noise, or anything else served up one tune at a time. Today we hear a combination of unrealized promise and cheesy cheek in a current blog favorite that revives a 1999 pop-dance smash you may have wanted to forget.
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And now it's time for another installment of Rock-Critically Correct, in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by an anonymous writer who's contributed to several of those titles—or maybe even all of them! After the click-through, he examines the most recent issue of Spin:
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Idolator
