To whom does Spin turn to helm its September '08 issue? To an artist who came to light in 1994, a guy who a signed a contract that guaranteed him the ability to release music on indie labels but nonetheless went straight into the major-label breach and has remained there since, despite a consistently professed indifference towards how corporate machination may impact him. An artist whose modus operandi split the difference between the Sub Pop and electronica eras, upon both of which Spin bet the farm in the 1990s.

Beck Hansen could have been made up by a couple of mid-'90s Spin editors over the phone. Follow the guy around for a week or so, try to engage him in conversation, transcribe the useful portions of the conversation, throw in references to "bricolage" and "William Burroughs' cut-up technique," and you had Spin gold.

This formula held true from the release of Mellow Gold and through that of Midnite Vultures, a five-year period when even folks who found him too affected and too "look at all the records I have and how cleverly I combine them" would be hard-pressed to deny that Beck had pretty hot hands.

Your very own Correspondent more or less thinks Beck is a worthwhile artist; he hasn't much affection for the "croak into a mic while blooped and bleeped iterations of Skip Spence's Oar creeps along" tendency common to Sea Change and Beck's most recent Modern Guilt. While he prefers Beck with a spring in his step, it should be noted that Guero and The Information didn't yank his crank.

Beck probably would have benefited from a more protracted break in the last decade than he's taken. He's often been compared to another little "musical genius," but YC thinks the example of Prince from about 1992 to 2000, as a guy who refused to go away for awhile and recharge, is instructive w/r/t to Beck's productivity. Both can depend on die-hard fans to take an interest in whatever they do, but other folks' interest will flag until a vital vein happens to be tapped. (YC should say it is not for him to dictate a musician's work-rate and how a musician wishes to provide for his dependents.)

So here's Beck, two months away from the release of Modern Guilt and on tour in Europe. It is there that writer John McAlley shadows him for Spin's September 2008 cover story. The writer employs an overly cutesy conceit in "Reverberations: the Beck Sessions," wherein story elements are presented as if they were tracks awaiting mixing at a recording session. We learn that Beck is diffident in conversation as ever; that he looks at Scientology as something that has always been in his life, vis-a-vis his father's longstanding affiliation; and that, since Modern Guilt is the last record he's obligated to deliver to Universal, his future records will probably be released independently.

And so it seems that Beck arrives on the cover of Spin simply because the editorial braintrust had no better option this month. Perhaps no suitably promising acts have been been spewed into an onerous major label recording contract from the undernourished maw of the indie-rock blawgosphere, which has been Spin's preferred scenario for the past year. But with this cover, perhaps the mag can attract older readers, them what have more of a print habit than their younger cousins and to whom Beck, despite needing a shot in the arm real bad, is a comfortable reminder of, y'know, how cool everything was in the 1990s. Kinda like Spin!

Now a few notes:

1. YC briefly listened to Canadian synthesizer terrorists Crystal Castles a while ago, and didn't like what he heard. He had one look at the couple of pictures of Castle Ethan Kath in the photo essay "Thick as Thieves" and concluded that the guy was the patron saint of every smug, metal t-shirt wearing hipster cocksucker YC sees at every club show in New York City. Then he read the text, and learned that Kath used to be known as Ethan Deth, bassist for the biker-metal band Kill Cheerleader. YC interviewed Kath/Deth two years ago for a front-of-book article in Spin that did not result in further assignments from the mag. While he didn't like Kill Cheerleader's music, Deth/Kath was a most entertaining interviewee, which reminds YC that he should not summarily dismiss people who merely look like jerks.

2. It is not YC's custom to criticize performers specifically with little regard to what it is written about them in a given mag. But indulge him this time! Patti Smith is the subject of this issue's Spin Interview. Unlike Beck and Prince, Smith did indeed take a break from recording from 1979 to 1988 and again from 1989 to 1996, none of which has improved her profoundly doctrinaire, "rock and roll is like poetry, maaaann" M.O. from abject worthlessness. YC believes Smith to be an artist who is only concerned with a pompous, oracular spoken-word tradition that, frankly, is intolerable without a strong basis in, y'know, being musical. So there!

3. Finally, Marc Weingarten pens "Speak of the Devil," a story regarding Stanton LaVey, the grandson of Satanic Bible auteur Anton LaVey. It's a pretty engaging portrait of a young man who dines out in Los Angeles on his grandfather's reputation—running around with strippers and porn stars, hanging out with Marilyn Manson and Hank III and otherwise acts transgressively for a modest living. Consequently, most conscientious Satanists (presumably including his mother, with whom he is estranged) believe him to be a lightweight, rather like lots of celebrity scions.

What is it with the cover of the August '08 Spin? It would be self-evident that Aimee Duffy takes a good picture, so Your Correspondent can't quite figure out why Editor-in-Chief Doug Brod, Photo Editor Michelle Egiziano, and whomever else involved would go with an image finding the Welsh pop-soul thrush bending forward slightly, her left hand extended towards an imagined reader. "Please, suh," she seems to be asking, "may I have some more?" Or maybe it's "Please, Spin readers, give my album a shot so that I am not dismissed prematurely as a middlebrow lightweight?" Several shots inside the mag would be more suitable, but perhaps it's relevant that none but the cover shot hints at her modest décolletage.

In any case, this is the first female-fronted Spin since last year, when the July cover featured Miss Duffy's less well turned out analogue. Three weeks ago, YC wrote about how Blender's options with respect to male cover subjects was limited: it seems like Spin has a similar quandary. Whichever band largely composed of young men at a particular time that's being pushed beyond the blogosphere and into the wider world can reasonably shoot for the mag's cover, or can expect the mag to come calling. But which freestanding female solo artist can expect the same thing?

Santogold? Too niche and, as YC insists on pointing out from time to time, publishing lore dictates that cover images of African-Americans on publications aimed at white folks tend to do poorly on the newsstand (several years ago, a former Spin staffer once said in YC's presence that, in the Web 1.0 era, the mag's readers would respond unfavorably, even viciously, to any content regarding hip-hop), and he believes that this will remain in effect in the Obama era. M.I.A.? Too niche and too exotic. Feist? Sure; in light of the placement of "1, 2, 3, 4" in an Apple ad, it's hard to see why Spin didn't go with her in the past two years. Katy Perry? She's probably considered too tethered to pre-fabricated pop. And that's about it.

As it is, writer Amanda Petrusich makes much of Duffy's babe-in-the-woods qualities in "Girl From the North Country." The 24-year-old apparently did not saturate in popular culture in Nefyn, the remote Welsh hamlet where she grew up, and she must now negotiate the hostility from the likes of both Estelle and Alison Goldfrapp. The drift of Petrusich's story is that Duffy was unformed musically after competing on the Welsh version of American Idol and has since been tutored in classic soul by her producer Bernard Butler, as well as Rough Trade honcho and former PiL sideperson Jeanette Lee. So when everybody says she's inauthentic, YC responds that, while her music has made little impression on him, we cannot punish every singer who did not tumble out of the womb grasping a copy of Shuggie Otis' Inspiration Information.

"But wait, you logorrheaic laggard," YC hears you shouting at your screen, "what about the band lately transitioning from the environs of Pitchfork to that of Letterman who are profiled in this issue? Why aren't they on the cover?" Indeed, a feature on the the Black Kids is included in this issue, and YB would have thought that band the likely cover stars. But, given the skin tones of Reggie and Ali Youngblood, it would seem the conventional wisdom referred to above might scotch the band's chances.

"The Kids Are Alright," written in British-pop-writer-spends-time-with-hot-rock-band boilerplate by Spin's London correspondent Tim Chester, depicts the band running around England, saying all the standard "no one wants to be in a buzz band... people get incredibly caught up in things that we're just not interested in, like blogs and hype and how music is distributed" demurrals that people in Reggie Youngblood's position are obliged to offer. Not much to write home about there, but dig this issue's lead review of the Black Kids' major-label debut, Partie Traumatic.

Said appraisal is written by Barry Walters, a veteran freelancer who has written record reviews for all the major music magazines for at least a decade. Walters can squeeze significant insight into 50-100 words, which certainly makes him popular with review editors. But he also can spew the kind of hyperenthusiastic piffle that surely makes him popular with publicists. To wit: "Kissing goodbye to the obsolete racial and gender roles that pop, hip-hop or indie rock still demand, Youngblood and pals throw a thrillingly subversive victory party to lift the country out of eight years of anguish." Yikes, dude! Either Walters worryingly believes this fucking record— which YB likes just fine for Bernard Butler's huge, crackling production and probably not for the band's own merits— has made the presumptive Democratic candidate redundant, or he really really wants to continue receiving albums from Columbia Records.

Now, as long as we find ourselves grappling with issues of race in our rock rags...

While it can seem at times that black music is only suitable for inclusion in Spin when filtered through British women proffering decades-old iterations of R&B and soul —not to mention Black Kids' hangup on Robert Smith and Jarvis Cocker— this issue happens to feature pieces on African-American musicians known for working in traditionally African-American musical contexts. In "Body & Soul," a story of the sort Vibe should invest in from time TO time, David Peisner reports on the ascent and decline of D'Angelo, who evolved from doughy teddy bear to sculpted loverman to doughy drunk driver over the course of a decade. In the telling of Peisner's typically well-written and diligently reported story, D'Angelo's inability to produce much new music is chalked up to his discomfort with how his figure was fetishized in the video for "Untitled," as well as his being generally unprepared for stardom. Meanwhile, Thomas Golianopoulos interlocutes Q-Tip, who is readying The Renaissance (his first solo record in nine years), in the Spin interview.

Both articles regard artists who cannot be said to be currently situated in the thick of any kind of vanguard, and both dudes are likely to count a lot of fans in Spin's readership. These conditions are easily reconcilable, in that African-American artists are most likely going to seen with greater affection by rock fans the further they are from their most creative periods.

Thankfully, Music Editor Charles Aaron pens a record review a black artist who, like him or not, is firing on all cylinders. Aaron finds Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III confounding, and thus assigns a series of ampersands, exclamation points and other non-star symbols to convey his assessment. It may seem like a dodge, but at least Aaron is struggling with a hip-hop artist whose time is now.

But while future yard sale dollar record boxes are getting a new supply, vinyl pressings are expected to get pricier because of the higher price of petroleum, from which vinyl is made. The pressing plant used by Sub Pop records, for example, recently raised its prices, citing petroleum costs as one reason.

At United Record Pressing, in Nashville, Tenn., Jay Millar, director of marketing, noted that the industry is based, in every sense, on petroleum, from the vinyl itself to the oil that keeps the machines lubricated to the gas used to transport records, which are heavier than CDs.

"Realistically there's not a component involved in our manufacturing that hasn't gone up," he said, noting that the company is weighing a price increase. "I think it's inevitable."

Putting an album out on vinyl is a bigger commitment than making a CD, said Mike Jones, the CEO of CDForge in Portland. Last year, the company's volume of vinyl work doubled over 2006, and Jones expects a similar increase this year. The basic cost of a CD is about $1 per unit; for vinyl, which is a more labor-intensive process, it's more like $4-$8 per unit for the initial pressing. "The artist and the record label really have to believe in its importance," he said.

CDForge doesn't press vinyl itself; the company deals with Rainbo Records, in California, where the cost of vinyl's gone up since the start of the year. "It's gone up 11 percent since January 1st, and I understand another increase is coming, about a 4 to 6 percent increase," said Steven Sheldon, the company president. Including gas prices, the per-record cost has probably gone up 20 to 22 cents a record, he said.

Not mentioned, but vinyl is also a greater reach for retailers, since the record format has generally been non-returnable to distributors. (Watch out for a sale on those Sara Bareilles LPs in a few months!) Thankfully for those producing vinyl, the format seems less sensitive to price increases, since the lure is less connected to the actual music than the pride of ownership, at least in some cases. The compact disc has clearly lost its intrinsic value, but the record industry still has a chance to find its way by selling vinyl at Hot Topic locations.

Will oil prices sink the vinyl record boom? [The Oregonian via Coolfer]

It has been a long-running meme at this column that mainstream entertainment magazines don't like it much when their competitors run a cover story featuring the same famous people at the same time as they. And so it comes to pass that the July 2008 Spin hits newsstands two weeks after the most recent issue of Rolling Stone. The former comprises an image of the entire lineup of Coldplay, whereas the latter features only the band's front-sissy Chris Martin. RS is clearly observing prevailing publishing wisdom that an image of a single individual will produce better newsstand sales than that of several; Spin goes with the noble concept that "Coldplay is a band."

But Your Boy wonders if the respective muckety-mucks of Spin and Rolling Stone can muster any righteous indignation as to which has the exclusive right to feature the most self-effacing rock band in the history of the world around the release date of Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends. It seems like all concerned would keep their heads down, play ball with one of the few bands to debut in the past decade that can command a consensus among people around the world that have no "oh they're just the Home Depot version of Radiohead" bona fides to prove, and hope that these issues do well in a crumbling marketplace and not worry that the dudes across the street had the same access they did. But Spin's braintrust must be pleased that their issue came out two days before Coldplay's record debuted at No. 1.

In any case, the issue under consideration this week is a Bizarro World version of Spin's June 2007 issue, which perhaps unintentionally featured a three-part examination of what the term "rock star" used to connote: namely, a imperially arrogant, debauched, and extravagantly wealthy individual. This month, again perhaps unintentionally, the mag presents a trisected meditation on how residents of the indie-rock diaspora are often seized by notions of humility.

Spin begins, of course, with Michael Joseph Gross' "Shine On," in which he spends some time in London with Coldplay. Gross presents a woman who works next to the band's rehearsal space: she knows little of the band other than that they are unassuming and that they are probably "crap at what they do." He recounts the standard litany of Koldplay Komplaints—their music is dull, the 40-Year-Old Virgin "gay" comment—then notes that the band's new album is produced by Brian Eno and Arcade Fire knobsman Markus Dravs, and is thus spikier and more challenging than its previous music.

For the remainder of the piece, Gross portrays the dudes being self-deprecating. They are self-deprecating while planning the band's marketing; they are self-deprecating in that they foolishly ceded too much decision making to others and erred in dismissing their now-reinstated manager, Dave Holmes; Martin frets over the possibility that someone might think the name of the album and the video for "Violet Hill" are pretentious, as well as the celebrity culture that makes his family's life trying; and so on.

YB should mention here that he was interested to learn that Martin's grandmother is Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe's next-door neighbor. But otherwise, YB is mostly struck that with Coldplay, the now 15-year-old expectation that musical artists should not behave in a manner associated with Louis XIV dovetails with an ancient and very English notion that one should not draw undue attention to or seem altogether pleased with oneself.

Similarly, Deputy Editor Steve Kandell's "Animal Collective of Montreal" (BTW: no matter the knowledge and predilections of Spin's readership, that's one unwieldy mufuggin' headline) concerns the Canadian quartet Wolf Parade. The men of this band are also laconic and concerned/unconcerned with seeming too prepossessing: like Coldplay, they each profess a lack of interest in cellphones and the innuhnet, and are bemused that anyone cares much for their music. Unlike Gross, Kandell ascribes these traits to the band's nationality; he also delightfully describes singer/guitarist Dan Boeckner as being "one blue knit cap away from being Jimbo from The Simpsons."

Finally we come to "Fjord Escorts," which concerns how the Swedish government takes an active interest in and indeed subsidizes native musicians as key exports abroad. The piece is written by Adam Sachs, a fellow YB has known since he was 14 years old and with whom he spent a long weekend prior to this writing, so he must recuse himself from any qualitative assessment. He'll just leave you with the fact that Swedes—part of the Scandinavian continuum populated by folks widely considered to be exceedingly reserved—seem to regard music and musicians as humble artisans producing exquisitely designed and serviceable craft, and not powerfully self-involved "art."

YB should say here that he tends to desire humility in his personal acquaintances, in elected servants, and in other players in public life. And it may be that most self-conscious, middle-class music fans were taught by Nirvana 15 years ago and by the domestic and foreign policies of the current administration that swaggering around with your big dick is bad. "Those folks are not like the Motley Crue, most rappers, or the tweakers on all those realty shows," they might say. "They're like me: responsible and humble. They look like they go to the same bar as me." And perhaps some of the people interviewed in these three articles are in fact preening jerks, but are adept at concealing this from journalists.

But YB more or less believes that some artists should be arrogant. Swaggering around with your big dick when you have a titanic, compelling gift that enriches the human race is okey-dokey in YB's book, and he'd like the regular-guy paradigm to go away for a while.

Some of you might be old enough to remember people complaining about how the music just didn't sound right on any format but vinyl (including a creepy character accused of rape on a episode of 90210), and of course, there are those who complain about any file format that isn't completely lossless. Also, there's John Mellencamp.

Last year, Amazon and iTunes made concessions to upgrade the quality of their download tracks.

Some artists want the bar raised even higher. Metallica announced last week that its upcoming untitled album, in addition to being released on CD, will be available as a higher-quality digital download ($12) and on audiophile vinyl in a limited-edition $125 boxed set. It's due this fall....

John Mellencamp's upcoming Life, Death, Love and Freedom CD, due July 15, will come with, at no extra charge, a high-definition DVD stereo version that will play in most DVD players. Producer T Bone Burnett and his engineering team developed the DVD music technology because they grew exasperated about the state of digital music. Listening to the high-res disc, "I could hear the music the way it was intended to be heard," Mellencamp said in a statement.

Neil Young recently announced that the first volume of his long-awaited archives project would arrive this fall on 10 Blu-ray Discs. The rocker, who has long decried the sound of CD and digital recording as brittle, says, "Previous technology required unacceptable quality compromises." In addition to HD video, Blu-ray Disc players support the playback of high-resolution music beyond a CD's dynamic range.

I'm sorry, but it's clear that the majority of consumers couldn't care less about the specifics of how their music sounds. The first thing they are concerned about is price ("128kbps MP3 files? A bit of a downer, but it's their entire discography in one torrent!"). Someone willing to question the intentions of, let's say, Metallica might believe that selling albums in increasingly expensive formats is more of a revenue-based move than an artistic one. I'm sure the new Mudcrutch album rings true and beautiful on audiophile vinyl, but it feels better for the bottom line when you pay $30 for it instead of $10. Even if the higher-quality option is at no additional cost, as in the case of the Mellencamp disc, any format that requires people to listen somewhere besides their car or a MP3 player of some sort is going to be immediately marginalized.

But, hey, maybe the reason I want to purchase fewer discs this year isn't that the albums themselves are bad, they're just pressed that way.

Musicians push for better sound online and on disc [USA Today]

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.

• RJ Reynolds will not take being critiqued lightly. The tobacco company pulled all print advertising in the wake of the Camel/Rolling Stone kerfuffle; ads for its death sticks used to take up lots of space in all of the music mags.

• The auto business isn't doing so well, either. Car manufacturers have cut their magazine-ad spending by 21% across the board, meaning fewer crazy pull-outs that garnered big dollars for magazines.

• The record business, well... It's probably piling on to say this, isn't it? Especially given the goodbye notes we've seen from departing magazines over the past few years. But it's also notable that the amount of co-op advertising (advertisements from outlets that sell music that use ); in the May 2008 issue of Spin, for example, the only ad I can see from a retailer appears to be from Best Buy.)

• It's the Internet's fault! Of course! "We're putting money in Pandora and other music [sites] that in the olden days would probably all have gone to Rolling Stone," Dentsu America's executive media director Scott Daly told Crain's. "We're trying to reach young, early adopters—which Rolling Stone reaches, but it doesn't have a lock on them." And the magazines' Web sites haven't exactly filled the online void: "We tend to look for best of breed.... to date, we've typically found companion Web sites inferior to the printed product," said Daly. (Perhaps Spin's recent online efforts, which include putting the entire magazine online, have helped it stop the bleeding.) One would argue that the hermetically sealed world of blogs probably isn't the best alternative for advertisers interested in attracting people who want to actually experience things that are outside of their worldview, but my putting forth that argument could be one of the many reasons that I've been in the content business for so long.

Music magazines shaking and rattling [Crains; HT Chris Molanphy]

Vladislav Delay - "Recovery IDea" (Semantica)
Delay is of course well-known among bedroom house-ophiles for the diminishing returns of his dancefloor-oriented Luomo project, which began in 2000 with the spare, spacey, and brilliant Vocalcity and continued through a regrettable process of half-assed pop-flavored sweetening to arrive at the gauche, neon keyboard noodles of 2006's Paper Tigers. A songsmith Delay is not; he's most productive when suspended between ancient house music call-and-response hooks and washes of crackly digital atmosphere. So how fares his most recent return (literal in the case of this hard drive offcut) to the instrumental dub-techno that first made waves across various IDM discussion hubs at the tail end of the '90s, the stuff that was all crackle and no hooks? Wrapped in headphones—the good ones, not the chintz that comes pre-packed with your media player—it's pretty damn compelling, a squishy symphony for doors slammed shut by the wind in a parking garage overnight or feet tramping blindly through the snow. "Recovery IDea" is the sort of Autechre-esque slurp and clang that becomes weirdly affecting when a producer (as Delay does here) layers an atmospheric hum behind it, like a murmur of Erik Satie strings tying the stray noises into something almost human. Dancefloor remixes from Andy Stott, Fibla, and others add some drive to that slurp and clang, but their traditionalist techno rhythms offer the unexpected side effect of dampening some of the track's strange magic by tidying up Delay's trippy timekeeping.

Vladislav Delay [MySpace; Hear the track here]

Blood On The Wall - "Acid Fight" (Social Registry)
Liferz, New York band Blood On The Wall's album of throwbacks to the bratty murk I sieved from indie-rock zine recommendations while in high school, has been out for a minute, and I did enjoy it upon the first few listens before the Times New Viking album made it feel somewhat redundant. It was only after I saw it lurking on Matos' quarter-of-the-year-gone 'round up that I replayed album-closer "Acid Fight" and I'm glad I did. The blogosphere has taken the easy way out en masse in constantly comparing singer Brad Shanks (rightly more or less) to a pre-maturity Black Francis, but I'm gonna be contrary and say the first thing to come to mind was Weird Al commissioned by Touch And Go to parody the Jesus Lizard's David Yow, minus the cock-swinging. (At least in the first minute, Shanks panting heavy about something being wrong with his face, the kind lines that've launched a thousand Flipper tributes.) The song's mostly a lugubrious goof—in case the non-sequitur title and the invocation of Mr. Yankovic didn't tip you off—but the grungy riff (in the "less Possum Kingdom, more Slay Tracks" sense) and Ibold-bass seesaw back-and-forth with more of those golden-age indie yuks than you'd find in a mountain of modern folkies.

Blood On The Wall [MySpace]

Mann feat. Sean Kingston - "Ghetto Girl" (Sony/BMG)

I burned through the above two reviews fairly quickly before coming upon "Ghetto Girl" and needing to take a break because I was rendered momentarily brain-dead by Sean Kingston and his utterly shameless producer/groomer J.R. Rotem's latest plundering of my sister's old 45 collection for hooks. (What's next, the Go-Go's "Vacation"? "Goonies Are Good Enough"? A "Little Critter" story?) The beat's got the kind of tinny, crappier-than-an-actual-ringtone quality that gives a bad name to good ol' fashioned cheap-sounding Southern rap; baby-faced L.A. rapper Mann is the bold-faced name offering the girl-crazy rhyming ballast on the verses; but typically for '08 the whole point is Kingston's balls-out interpolation, which had Maura wondering if his "father was really a Z100 playlist from 1985." Rotem's borrowing is even more crudely blatant than the Ben E. King lift on "Beautiful Girls," and perhaps not coincidentally, I'm 75 percent sure I despise this more on the fifth play more than I did "Beautiful Girls" on the fiftieth. (It helped that I found "Beautiful Girls" charming 'til overexposure set my teeth grinding with every "suiiiiicidal.") Then there's that niggling 25 percent that has me playing it again, laughing through the wincing, and thinking that if the song becomes as inescapable as Kingston's smash, we can at least console ourselves that no crossover teen hip-hop acts have discovered the ack-ack-ack-ack hook inside "Movin' Out" just yet.

Mann [MySpace]

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."

I've actually had copies of the lists for a few years before getting the whole thing back into my hands: researching an earlier project, I'd photocopied articles from a large number of back issues at the magazine's offices. Still, it's far more instructive to see them as part of the entire cover package—especially since I wasn't able to reproduce one of them thanks to its placement against a dark-grey background. Mark Blackwell and Jim Greer's "Death as a Career Move" lists the artists who, to that point, had benefited the most from dying: "Rankings are based on amount of sales increase after death of the artist." Here's the Top 10, with dates of death in parentheses.

1. Elvis Presley (Aug. 16, 1977)
2. John Lennon (Dec. 8, 1980)
3. Jim Morrison (July 3, 1971)
4. Jimi Hendrix (Sept. 18, 1970)
5. Janis Joplin (Oct. 3, 1970)
6. Roy Orbison (Dec. 6, 1988)
7. Buddy Holly (Feb. 3, 1959)
8. Keith Moon (Sept. 25, 1980)
9. Marc Bolan (Sept. 16, 1977)
10. John Bonham (Sept. 7, 1978)

The full list is 30 long, by the way, not 35—just one way the issue's package shows its seams. But that raggedness is also what's most fascinating about it, then and now.

"Then," I should say, clouds "now" to a great degree. I'd only begun buying Spin a year before, with the issue featuring Flea on the cover, so I'd missed the magazine's earlier list extravaganza, featuring the infamous list of 100 greatest singles headed up by Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock's "It Takes Two," which had come out a year before. And growing up, I spent weekends in the city with Loretta and Arlene, my great-grandaunts—I lived in the suburbs—and from 13 on I'd begun exploring the city on my own. I purchased the 8/90 Spin after looking for it at about six drugstores up and down Lake Street in south Minneapolis on a great, hot summer day perfect for the long walk. The whole thing made a lasting impression, and it's almost impossible not to look at the issue now without recalling details of my grandaunts' house: the enormous oak dining room table, the tan nylon curtains, the screened-off porch where Loretta and Arlene smoked, Kemps vanilla ice cream in the meat locker next to the back door, the wondrous walk-in pantry, painted yellow to offset the white of the kitchen proper.

In 2008, though, the overriding impression is how obvious the issue's cover concept was the work of Legs McNeil, then a Spin senior editor who oversaw the package. The features—Jim Morrison of course, Esquerita, Les Paul, the Cramps, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop—comprise a pantheon that should click with anyone familiar with McNeil's and Gillian McCain's oral history of New York punk, Please Kill Me. So should much of the roughly chronological "35 Meetings of Rock'n'Roll Minds," which McNeil co-compiled with Holly Holiday and Jennifer Bernstein. (19 of the entries are book excerpts, nine come from old Spin articles, six are described without credits, and at No. 21 is "David Bowie Meets God [unconfirmed].") Similarly, the Scott Cohen-compiled "35 Seconds That Say It All" is an unnumbered grab bag of interview quotes that make their own singular context. (James Brown, 1987: "Q: Where did the words for your song 'For Goodness Sake, Look at Those Cakes' come from? A: From God. Q: What kind of deodorant does the 'Hardest Working Man in Show Business' use? A: Right Guard.")

But "pantheon" is probably the wrong word to use here. What made the 8/90 Spin so engrossing was how untethered to a neat pantheon all this stuff was. This wasn't mere historicization; there was no bow tying the narrative together. For all of McNeil's obvious touch, many of these items seemed to come from different direction than the last; that still seems to me like the lifeblood of a dynamic magazine. You might not have a toehold in everything, but the fact that it was all being claimed for the same sensibility was exciting in itself. It helped fill in the background of my increasing obsession with music, and helped teach me how deep and unlimited that background could be.

Reading Rolling Stone talk about old bluesmen was fascinating, but also like homework. Spin's "35 Blues Guitarists Who Definitely Started It All," written by Jim Marshall, took the stuff out of the museum and made it seem real, tactile, alluring. ("20. Jody Williams. The unsung hero of many Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Otis Rush and Jimmy Rogers records. His solo on Diddley's 'Who Do You Love?' is a lesson in evil.") Even more jolting was the chronological "35 Greatest Moments in Rock'n'Roll Television," by Michael Corcoran, whose prize moments of irreverence and outlandishness were brought home by the writing: "32. January 29, 1983: Prince appeared on Solid Gold. Prince brought his entire stage set-up, complete with lights, ramps and backdrop, not to mention eight backing musicians, and then lip-synced '1999.'"

Finally, two things. One: while looking for back issues recently I came across this blog post from last year by Marlon James, a writer I hadn't encountered before. (A Twin Citian, too, though I should note I haven't lived in Minnesota for nine years.) It's a little clunky—blogs are like that, mine included—but it sums up well the mag's appeal before it hardened into an alt-rock bible, as well as its more recent wobbliness, and I like how heartfelt it is.

The other thing is another Top 10—four of them, actually, my favorites of the issue even though it had nothing to do with 35 years of anything. It's from "Word Up," a quarter-page front-of-book piece by Gavin Edwards, who would later compile many small books of misheard lyrics. This list is about hearing lyrics right, and tallying them up. Edwards takes the words from all the songs by Madonna, Paula Abdul, Tracy Chapman, and Guns N' Roses, "count[s] their nouns, exclude[s] the pronouns, and tote[s] up their rock'n'roll vocabularies." The Top 10 most-used words for each, to that point, are as follows. It may not be all that clever today, but I've always loved these lists purely as found poetry.

MADONNA
1. love
2. baby
3. time
4. heart
5. eyes
6. world
7. girl
8. party
9. boy
10. day

PAULA ABDUL
1. baby
2. way
3. love
4. girl
5. thing
6. heart
7. boy
8. fool
9. eyes
10. world

TRACY CHAPMAN
1. time
2. heart
3. love
4. life
5. baby
6. soul
7. man
8. car
9. mountain
10. people

GUNS N' ROSES
1. love
2. train
3. jungle
4. city
5. honey
6. patience
7. life
8. pain
9. mommy
10. knees

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.

You know, the kind of bands that base their entire aesthetic on a three-album collision involving Rocket To Russia, Singles Going Steady, and The Incredible Shrinking Dickies. The kind that will never get the blogs tripping or win the kind of "Best New Whatever" write-ups that send digital sales spiking because they don't tart up their ancient two-chords and unchangeable walking basslines with snatches of folk, pasted-on electronics, or goofy Animal Collective voices. The sort that used to write cutesy diatribes about Green Day's success fucking up the scene. The kind that could have earned a begrudging, smudgy Maximumrockandroll interview where "Gilman St." would be used as an adjective.

"Do they even still make that stuff?" I hear some of you asking, and if it wasn't my teenage bread and butter, I doubt I'd know either. But as my 30th birthday has come and gone and my critical peers continue to cosign the worst hippie crud (whether neo- or retro-) when they're not venerating Bono in the name of indie stadium bombast, I've found my tolerance for soft rock and prog pomp tested beyond all reason, and I've regressed back to high school punk rock rules in the face of mellow gold madness (both the rock and dance varieties) and various Canadian scourges.

Yet despite my lingering affection for punk at its most doctrinaire, anyone sporting liberty spikes who took a look at my 2007 "Most Played" playlist would probably cry foul. Despite some of the best "punk" bands going using iPods for a rhythm section or piling distorted noise-boy keyboards on top of one another or swiping from Max Martin's fakebook, the genre's hardliners officially remains as intractable as the auto industry when it comes to hybridizing. For those who lost some of their faith when they discovered life beyond the early Lookout! catalog, finding good punk these days still means digging into the genre's weirdo fringe and its digitally-compressed crossover kiddies. After all, it's not as if we've been hurting for catchy punk records, whether made in lofts or Disney-owned studios, records that you have to prefix with either art- or mall-. In some ways, it's a golden age. (In other ways, it's an unmanageable glut, but I'm trying to stay positive.)

And yet, and yet: one of my highlights last year was rediscovering those classicist VFW hall dudes, whether old or new, still spit-shining that same basement show shtick. (For instance, perhaps you knew that Ben Weasel put out a pretty good album last year; I didn't until the calendar had almost flipped. Again, my adolescent self was a little miffed—this stuff sounds much better in top-down June than hoodies-up December.) Early in 2007 a compilation was released, titled (with gentle sarcasm) Pop Punk's Not Dead, a 30-track recent scene overview that acted as my investigatory jump-off.

(Even by Second Spin's after-the-fact-analysis standards this one's been on the racks for a while, but it's my column and I'll do what I want.)

Only some of the names were familiar. (Who knew the Queers could continue to afford Converse and cheese dogs peddling the same surfin' safari kitsch after so many decades?) Whether I knew the bands or not, a lot of it rumbled pleasantly enough—nothing sent me plugging my ears or regretting my trip down memory lane—but with little personalized pizzazz to differentiate yet another trio of head-bopping boys awkwardly kitted-out in another generation's leather jackets and a moniker riffing on the Ramones.

On the one hand, this is precisely why this side of the sub-genre gets glossed by those not in the cult, year after year. Like all willfully formalist pop, theses bands live or die when it comes to winning new fans on the memorability of a cuddly fuzzed guitar tone, la-la quasi-hook, and/or snotty personality elevating one tune above another from the same rack. Further exploration proved that some of these bands really do stand out from their peers, though it's almost always by degrees: Guff have cringeworthy design sense but enjoyably crank up the tempo to springloaded Lifetime-esque hardcore; the Five O's peddle prickly power-pop riffage over melodic bass rumble, plus harmonies that suggest they're not totally opposed to a future on the radio if they invest a little beer money in cleaning up the murky production and godawful snare sound that's plagued these bands since before I could drive; ditto Teenage Bottlerocket, who possess the broadest range on the evidence, from straight CBGB's-circa-'76 jacking to second-stage Warped Tour sing-alongs; the Unknown just have a knack for writing the kind of compressed, fist-pumping chorus that actually makes a minute-long tune stick in the brain; and the prolific, witty Ergs are probably the best next-gen pop-punk act currently touring, certainly the first to (rightly) suggest that getting sauced and listening to The Royal Scam would make for a good date night.

But for many of the bands captured on Pop Punk's Not Dead differentiating themselves feels almost besides the point. (Which makes me feel less guilty over my initial snub.) As with plenty of insular communities built around a throwback sound, the generic-ness promises fans 30 instant hits of a known quantity, while unintentionally alienating those not immediately won over enough to bother judging one group against another when they all sound so frustratingly similar. (Did the Spazzys and the Unlovables stand out 'cuz of tunecraft or because hearing a female voice was such a balm after all those adenoidal-unto-irritating dudes? For the record, the latter definitely passed on their own bouncy merits.) There's also something faintly uncomfortable for a lot of pop critics about music that plants two sneakers in a given era and refuses to "evolve," even subtly; blogtime demands (for the worse) a rate of novelty turnover that this stuff stopped satisfying decades ago.

But to hell with novelty: I'm glad to have reconnected, and I don't think that stems from simple nostalgia, even if I can't really argue for this stuff with a straight face if you don't come to it with a bit of preexisting pubescent affection for the interchangeable second string of the genre's hopeless romantics, their sloppy songwriting and déjà vu riffs. (Pete Shelley and Blake Schwarzenbach don't have to worry about any of these kids knocking them out of the genre's first rank; Hayley Williams and Gerard Way don't either, for that matter.) But though it might not be "alive" enough to satisfy the needs of trendwatchers or Jonas Brothers fans, the zombie genre has provided me enough minute-and-change thrills over the last 18 months to suggest that anyone who harbors fond memories of the pre-Blink/emo era, anyone who ever owned a Mr. T Experience T-shirt but since lost the plot (I know you're out there), would do well to start poking MySpace until a few 21st-century pop-punk gems shake loose.

So there R.E.M. stands on the cover of the April 2008 Spin. The band and the publication enjoyed a mutually advantageous relationship for about a decade; the band's mid-'80s rise more or less precipitated the "college rock" boom, and thus Spin's initial rationale.

After a decade or so of evincing little interest in the band (neither, frankly, did any of the big American rock mags during the time, although Mojo and Q could be counted on to do cartwheels upon each record's release), Spin makes much of the increased "rock" quotient of R.E.M.'s new album, Accelerate. In his editor's letter, Doug Brod more or less promotes the line that the band's prior three records were sleepy and that this album is a stunning return to form.

Your Boy hasn't fooled much with R.E.M. in the past two decades or so and only recalls hearing two songs from those evidently turgid three. He never thought that R.E.M.'s variety of "rocking," if that term is to be understood as music marked by an aggressive rhythm, was up to much: the band's early-Byrds jingle-jangle stylings never struck him as particularly ballsy; he was bemused that several commenters last month defended the band's club-footed grunge/glam rock gambit Monster; and in any case he thinks that Bill Berry's shit was weak (perhaps Bill Rieflin, a drummer who has worked with YB's beloved King Crimson, has enlivened Accelerate, which YB has not yet heard).

The scribbler of "R.E.Born," is Michael Azerrad, author of the benchmark chronicle of the college-rock era Our Band Could Be Your Life and a true believer in the holy trinity of SST, Homestead and Twin/Tone. He is a contemporary of the band, and thus Stipe, Buck and Mills seems to be pretty comfortable with him: a younger rock scribe might have been too intimidated to ask Michael Stipe about his sexual orientation. As of Tuesday, the fruit of that exchange was dutifully picked up by various media outlets, despite the fact that Stipe's discussed this before. Otherwise, Azerrad and the band agree that the "guys playing together in a room" paradigm works better than the "insular" electronic model; the band is "rocking" again, and so now Spin can fully support R.E.M. Watch as the reconciled pair rides off into the sunset...

Easily the best piece in the issue is "Who Earns What," a survey in which frequent contributor David Browne interviews 25 unnamed folks who make their living in what used to be known as the music business. We learn of each individual's "perks" (a Florida-based Zep tribute band singer who once worked in construction is pleased with the alcohol and food provided by each venue) and "pains" (the worst a "Superstar Touring DJ" from NYC can cite is that it gets lonely traveling by him/herself and coked-out nincompoops sometimes mess with him/her in the DJ booth).

That DJ says he makes $400,000 a year, an income only surpassed on this list to an NYC Artist Manager and an Indie Rapper Entrepreneur's respective $500,000. A Major-Label A&R Executive in Los Angeles says that he/she makes $92,000 at his/her current job; he/she made $250,000 at another label, which may have been Universal, since he/she cites soliciting talent-scouting advice from employees of mom-and-pop stores who recommended signing... 3 Doors Down!

We also learn that an NYC "Music Blogger" makes $35,000. That's $10,000 less than a Toronto-based Indie Rock Musician's $45,000, $5,000 less than the goddamn $40,000 earned by a Chicago Indie Label owner, and $5,000 more than an NYC Indie Rock Producer's $25,000. Read that again: some of y'all involved in the blawg-o-sphere are approaching financial equity with truly creative people!

But YB's favorite entry describes a Rock Radio DJ/Music Director from the Northeast who makes $65,000 and is especially proud of the free t-shirts he/she receives. This person acknowledges that "we have a playlist and we have to stick to it for business' sake," and apparently makes an additional $5,000-$10,000 from personal appearances. Now YB has a better idea how much Schmucky and Fuckface from "Assholes in the AM" on WSHT make when they show up to introduce Hinder at the local enormo-dome or preside over $2 draft night at Paddy O'Furniture's!!!

Then there's "Power Ballots," in which one David Peisner, last month's hardest-working fall guy for the stupid ways publications address problematic lead times, assesses the efficacy of entertainers participating in this year's presidential race. The piece's tone is suspicious: MoveOn.org's 2004 Vote for Change tour, which involved Bruce Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks, Death Cab for Cutie, and this issue's cover dudes, is described as a failure in light of President Bush's reelection. Interviewed artists like Pete Wentz, David Crosby, and will.i.am are careful to not seem like dilettantes preaching to an alleged great unwashed. No artist quoted seems as penitent as Moby: "If for the last six years, all I'd done was sit in a strip club drinking beer, the world would be probably be in the same shape it is now... no one wants some smug nerd from New York telling them who they should vote for."

Peisner notes that "John McCain arouses far less animosity among the creative class than the current president," to which he could have added that one of McCain's daughters is an experienced and well-liked publicist who has worked for V2 Records, among others. Peisner also includes the viewpoints of two Republican strategists, which is admirable considering that Rolling Stone would probably never dream of asking those horrible Republicans what they might think about various pop star's advocacy.

Ultimately, the story's implied thesis—"musicians often appear foolish or preachy when they loudly endorse a presidential candidate or a cause, and perhaps should focus on making the best music they can"—suits what may be Spin's posture, which is to distinguish itself from Rolling Stone's fervent limousine liberal proselytizing. YB wouldn't be surprised if this were to be Spin's last word on the election.

Finally, a word to Spin's braintrust: Please discontinue the Front of Book "oh snap"-oriented "Spin 20"—which proclaims that it's been "Ranking on Pop Culture Since 1998"—in which memes from a month prior to publication are dismissed with a curt one-liner. To wit: "Kanye West Launches Search Engine: Look for 50 Cent's webmail app—coded in Javascript, beeyotch!—the very same day"; "Portishead Reunite: Not so fast, Sneaker Pimps." This kind of editorial device may have made sense in the dawn of snark, but it seems clear to YB that "The Spin 20" should be relegated to the same landfill to which Entertainment Weekly consigned the similarly bitchy "Jim Mullen's Hot List." The use of the colloquialism "beeyotch" tells YB more about the writer's ideas of black culture than the writer likely intends.

Download the full map (1.09 MB)

ATLANTA: Has a few groups like Success and Effect, but, according to Skyywalker, the scene and sound are basically the same as Miami's. One A&R man at a New York-based major laber [sic] laments that all of the many demos that he gets from rappers in the deep south are marred by funny sounding accents and pronunciation. Unfortunately, "it's just not happening yet."

SEATTLE: Where the aptly named Sir Mix-a-Lot (real name Anthony Ray) has earned a reputation for eclecticism by doing everything from a "Squaredance Rap" to a cover of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man." While Mix-a-Lot has his disciples (Kid Sensation), his style is almost pop at times and his ability to adapt isn't always mirrored by other, more garrulous crews from Tacoma's gang infested hilltop section(recently profiled on CBS's "48 Hours"), which has produced High Performance, America's Most Wanted, PD 2, Ice Cold Mode and Ready and Wilin'. Also part of the Seattle scene are the Incredicrew and—to give you an idea of how far rap has come and will go—a Korean group called, but of course, the Seoul Brothers.

PORTLAND: May be put on the map by U Krew (signed to Enigma) who perform a kind of "MC Hammer, but more funky" type of rap.

HOUSTON: Has been heralded as the #3 market behind New York and "The West Coast," but the Texas town already thinks of itself as #2. While not a gangster groove, the Houston sound has a rough, raw, low, slow beat coupled with a good-for-humping bass. Of the roughly 60 to 70 groups, the Ghetto Boys and Willie D stand out, along with Royal Flush, Raheem, MC Candy, Romeo Poet, OG Style, and Def IV.

THE MIDWEST: Thought to be devoid of first rate rap, though A&R men at New York labels receive up to 30 demos a day "from St. Louis to every nook and cranny imaginable." As yet unimpressed, East Coast record execs don't foresee any hip-hop from the heartland in the near future.

NEW JERSEY: 45 King, Queen Latifah, Chill Rob G, Poor Righetous Teachers, Redhead Kingpin (real name David Guppy), Ice-T, Ice Cream Tee (born in Gainesville, grew up in Philly, studied at Rutgers), K.C. Flightt, Twin Hype (emigrated from South Carolina), King Sun (6'7" tall, speaks French and Spanish and his godfather is Muhammad Ali), Righteous Lakim Shabazz, K-9 Possee (met at Farleigh University and include Eddie Murphy's brother).

CLEVELAND: Where the rappers Bango (signed to Epic) and Chunky A are from.

(MAJOR thanks to Dickdogfood)

The Roots Feat. Dice Raw, DJ Jazzy Jeff, And Peedi Crakk - "Get Busy" (Def Jam)
Judging by the pre-release leakage from Rising Down, the Roots' rhythm tracks are now pushing for all their life against a suffocating layer of static and an smothering low-end closing in from the bottom. (Without booklet credits, I don't want to call that noise a "bassline" only to once again find out it's Mr. Tuba Gooding, Jr.) Philly breakout-who's-yet-to-break Peedi Crakk leapfrogged across a string of Roc-A-Fella tracks earlier in the decade that treated his sing-song flow like a sound effects record, groomed like so many Dash/Carter pet projects to wind up routed to the mixtape circuit and growing a chip on both shoulders. (Perhaps he missed the 2007 memo that all Philly rappers needed a Swizz beat to see any sort of chart love.) Surveying his rough decade alongside some hometown all-stars, he's less manic on the mic, but perhaps that's fitting given the track in question. The big beats on Peedi's old collabos hopped, skipped, and jumped; "Get Busy" trudges two slushy miles up Broad Street in big black boots because SEPTA stopped running at the first sign of crappy weather. Cold fronting against the windswept scratching from a guy who used to run afoul of Philip Banks and the band's immobilizing groove, Peedi flips up his hood, his middle finger, and offers lawyers and label heads the following unsolicited advice: "Fuck the Internet / Buy a baseball bat / Break a bootlegger leg."

Trance Rap Antidote [Cocaine Blunts]

D1 - "I'm Loving" (Tempa)
Like an Anglo-Caribbean cousin to the snarling Eastern Seaboard ish of "Get Busy," British producer D1 usually comes moanin' at midnight with the darker-than-the-rest sub-bass and thudding beats of dubstep; Tempa is one of the South London labels that initially mapped the increasingly confining parameters for the latest post-rave sub-genre barely distinguishable to American ears. But D1's always been a little softer than his pitch-black brethren, clinging to memories of clubbing fun during dubstep's long ban on anything that smacks of Chic-approved good times; whether "I'm Loving," much more suited to the daylight hours than anything I've recently heard from a dubstep producer, is merely the man following his particular muse or a concerted effort to rethink the genre's gloomy boom, it's quite welcome. D1's intercontinental syncopation is cooked from the kind of skipping Detroit techno hi-hats beloved by U.K. broken beat producers and the palsied carnival bounce of Trinidadian soca; add a fresh coat of bright synths and a sweet soul vocal hook and you've got something more suited to chilling at a beach house than skulking through the drizzle-soaked concrete-and-steel landscape suggested by crit-darling Burial and a grown and sexy twist on adolescent bassline heads reattaching house to the garage.

D1 [MySpace]
D1 - "I'm Loving [Boomkat sound samples]

Guillaume And The Coutu Dumonts - "Les Gans (Philip Sherburne Remix)" (Musique Risquée)
Music critic pal conflicts of interest abound, but I'd be fibbing if I didn't say this remix was my fave rave from this round of Single Spinning. Simple in the heart-tugging way good melodic, minimal techno should be, something often easy forget about given the genre's current glut: a fragile Brian Wilson chime and a Perlon-esque shaker-and-pop pattern opens to let in bass and synth before the track drifts from good to great on gliding, sad-eyed horn charts more Cinematic Orchestra than Ricardo Villalobos. Comparisons to anything remotely trip-hop are tricky given the tendency for potential listeners burnt on blunted beat comps to instantly recoil, and Sherburne's remix has too much snap to sink into the background. But more build-up or come-down than set climax, this would indeed fit on one of the early, excellent (no, really) Future Sounds Of Jazz comps quite nicely. (Don't snort, minimal snobs; the maestro Villalobos himself appeared on one of the series' later installments.)

Philip Sherburne Productions [MySpace]

Andrew WK - "McLaughlin Groove" (Fair Game)
When I was a small boy, my grandfather (may he R.I.P.) subjected his Catholic grandchildren to endless Sunday mornings spent not in church but around the TV for secular worship of various network news idols sermonizing from the magazine or roundtable mount. The only one of these windbags who could have possibly entertained a pair of grade schoolers cranky because they couldn't even enjoy whatever off-brand cartoons were being aired on UHF was John McLaughlin, whose bellowing, bellicose interruptions and radiant smugness were like watching one of your jerky prepubescent peers be plucked from the recess yard and plopped in a leather chair between Washingtonian insiders, instilling in us both a love for news and a love for shouting. Under the aegis of public radio arts'n'news show Fair Game, our beloved Andrew WK has recorded this cranked-up, karaoke-ready throwback to his I Get Wet-era sound in awed appreciation of that special "McLaughlin Groove," and while there's no reasonable explanation for two of my favorite loudmouths to have come together, I can only hope this hints at a possible duets record between strapping young Andrew and the aging Mr. McLaughlin right quick, before AWK has to posthumously put it together in an icky Alicia/Frankie style.

Andrew WK - McLaughlin Groove [MP3]
Fair Game [Official Site]

Parts And Labor - Escapers Two (Ace Fu)
Professional/personal whatever aside, Parts and Labor's Mapmaker got multiple Idolator editors/contributors/hangers-on gushing last year, even if not everyone on staff was down with the album's mix of classic art-pop/punk moves and circuitry made to squeal in service of killer hooks. Though recognizable as the same band from BJ Warshaw and Dan Friel's voices and the splurting fuzz of the sing-song keyboard/bass melodies, Escapers Two is less Mapmaker's follow-up than a five-dozen-and-one-track detour into self-dubbed "grindpop"—sadly some no mark seems to have beaten them to the slightly more shameless "power pop violence"—catchy ditties sometimes no longer than the seconds it takes to bleat a title like "Knee Deep In Compromise" over the pedal-busting beats of metal's speediest sub-genre. So yeah, it's a conceptual hoot, but it's also re-playable in a way the cheeky conceit might not suggest, isolating Mapmaker's most anthemic moments (dig the headbanging/fist-pumping "Lucky Times," for example) and shaving down the bridges and build-ups and breakdowns and other indulgent stuff like that. (Indulgent if you're trying to keep things under a minute, anyway.) The key is that the band doesn't ditch them entirely in their quest for harder-faster-louder LOLz. (P.S. As far as I know this is currently only available at the recently expanded band's merch table with wider release to follow; going to shows to buy records may seem delightfully pre-Web 1.0, but both EP and performance are more than worth venturing out for during the last few weeks of winter hibernation.)

Parts And Labor [Official Site]

Iron Lung - Sexless/No Sex (Prank)
Speaking of blasting concepts, it's hard to call this sick paean to pit bruises "how they did it in the old days," since grindcore/hardcore is all but deathless; there probably hasn't been a single month since Napalm Death's Scum (or maybe a certain Siege record) that some crusty collective hasn't devoted their off-hours to tweaking the sound's platonic 30-second blurt (or at least paying slavish homage to Mick Harris' muscle control). And though I'd be lying if I said that this well-named LP from arch Seattle anti-romantic twosome Iron Lung didn't trigger certain happy memories of '90s evenings spent slapping hams with nasty natty dreads out of the way in church basements—and with a sleeve by Rudimentary Peni's manic-obsessive doodler Nick Blinko, Iron Lung do value hardcore tradition—Sexless/No Sex is 2008 enough to thrill even those of neck-deep in scene history. Still, fans invariably know the various modes of attack: sometimes tunes like "White Flag" cut five or 10 seconds of down-tuned agony with spasms of grimy, hyper bass drum; sometimes, as on "Autojector," they let the fast shit fly in the first half and then downshift into slow and low for a vulgar display of just how loud two dudes can get; sometimes it's all spazz and no sludge.

Iron Lung [MySpace]

Young Dro - I Am Legend (Grand Hustle Mixtape)
The most pleasurable disc here for fans of grooves allowed to bump for more than a minute at less than 180 beats-per, locked-down homebody T.I.'s Scrabble partner Young Dro follows up 2006's great Best Thang Smokin' with this dense mixtape beset by the usual problems (you'll invariably prune a few of the 25 tracks on your own second spin) but worth copping for Dro's much-beloved, unhinged aspirational metaphors and schizo shit-talk, both of which frequently go beyond workaday boasts and beef into the best kind of batshittery. Dro, whose next-level tipsy mumble is winning a one-man war against up-north gripes about enunciation, professes his devotion to dining on the catch of the day every day, exhibits a worrying upholstery fetish, shops for birds at Petsmart, swipes from "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" for a chorus, explains the difference between mousse and moose during a defense of his own grooming habits, and taxes the imaginations of the folks at Pantone and Behr and Maaco as noted in great, approving detail here. (Though the day he drops "muffin mix" to describe his glove compartment is when it's really all over.) And heavy on the earbud-mocking low-end and light on hooks by the miserly one-note keyboard standards of many southern rap mixtapes, I Am Legend will likely pass or fail for first-time listeners on Dro's flow and comic twists on convention alone.

Young Dro [MySpace]

Wiz Khalifa's "Say Yeah" showed up on no less than three MySpace bulletins—and one message board thread—over the last week thanks to its video dropping on YouTube, and it's easy to understand why my online buddies might briefly boggle at a hip-hop tune that purloins the ecstasy/agony of the one-finger doot-doot from Alice Deejay's "Better Off Alone," a song that made turn of the millennium trips to the mall a euphoric experience. (Even if it was hard to feel too loved-up when you were killing time as designated bag holder during your companion's layover at Wet Seal.) The clip gives Kalifa's tune a second go-round with the kind of spontaneous, unconscious street-teaming that gets desperate label marketing departments moist even if it's just a minor followup push more than a month after the song first hit blogs/sites whose descriptions do not always inspire you to leave the comfy confines of your RSS reader to access the download or sift your way through the daily pile-up of non-opinion for the stream. The fact that I'm writing about it a good two weeks after the video hit the Internet probably just means that too much MDMA has crippled my all-important blogger's response time, but nonetheless, I remain fascinated by "Say Yeah" all those days later, and for reasons beyond the context of music crit turnover in Web 2.0, the bargain Gorgeous Ladies Of Epcot Center video treatment (notable mostly for its shameless use of Photoshop lens flare), or Khalifa's flow (passable), and the views on leisure time and the distribution of personal funds expressed in his lyrics.

While most not instantly repelled by the hook will probably hear "Say Yeah" as a gimmick good enough to survive a two-week run before it's suddenly the victim of yet another unsentimental hard drive pogrom, within those 10 or 12 shrill notes I (half) hear the perennial thrill of young folks with samplers making weird-ass bricolage from seemingly incompatible sources and rewriting pop history in favor of all those sounds long since judged beyond the pale thanks to certain calcified conceptions of cool. If you think that's heady stuff to try and pin on a record by a baby gangsta riffing on a couple of Dutch producers who were almost outshined by their backup dancers' vinyl bikinis, well, I admit I may be obsessed to the point of foolishness by the potential in pop's continuing intercontinental cultural summit. (Even if this time, it's just the meeting of urban America and Amsterdam pop-trance.) But it's only because I believe these cross-genre hookups still offer a much better chance for surprise/innovation/dumb fun than the steady diet of Flo Rida that 2008 has given us so far.

Still, "Say Yeah" is not a wholly unexpected development in Eurocentric stunt sampling, especially when one of our favorite tunes of 2007 rewrote Technotronic for homecoming slow jammers and when this (which really deserves a few thousand words of its own) almost went unheard as it slipped between the SXSW notices in my inbox and when plenty of folks have outlined how pop radio has been slowly rewritten in the last half of the decade by rave's rule book. "Say What" is just the most blatant post-rave lift so far, and not coincidentally the cheesiest. Khalifa is a 20-year-old MC treading the line between major label breakout and mixtape nobody who currently lays his head in Pittsburgh, making him barely cognizant during the heyday of Ya Kid K but a ripe 12 when Alice Deejay hit, his musical brain (like that of his 20-year-old producer) just malleable enough to be by influenced whatever radio/video happened to be bumping during the peak of trance's brief infiltration into U.S. pop, when tunes like "Never Be Alone" were called up (down?) from weekend nights spent broadcasting live and direct from your town's bridge-and-tunnel hotspot, when Paul Oakenfold had annexed huge swathes of rack real estate in big-box music sections.

So "Say Yeah" is, among other things, less a future-focused Netherlands-to-Pittsburgh conference call than a shameless celebration of holding onto grade school taste by two guys old enough to cast primary votes and not yet able to get into 21-and-over nights, and that juvenile vibe, which hangs over every minute of "Say What" (and other songs of its ilk), may be what's so off-putting to many listeners. (Trance isn't exactly the sound of modern maturity to begin with.) Tip, Phife, and the gang may have actually blared Archies records rather than jazz sides from kiddie turnables for all history knows, but for certain hip-hop fans, the important thing was that they had put away childish things by the time they were cutting their own tunes post-graduation. And unlike Timbaland hunting up Abdel-Halim Hafez or even Bronx bombers refashioning German art-rock, "Say What" doesn't get a pass from old heads because it's A.) is pretty crude (even if the perverse side of me wants to argue the Alice Deejay sample's deployment is no blunter than "Planet Rock" or "Big Pimpin'" once you're familiar with the originals) and B.) panders to high school kids (and Internet dwellers) with a big hunk of a known quantity despised by the self-serious rather than going Akai alchemical on something more outre. Listening, you can almost see the ashen looks on aging faces, but time and pop's merciless rate of talent turnover means naysayers should know by now that anything and everything may eventually end up devoured without prejudice by novelty-hungry tween hordes.

But while I'm generally in favor of pop shrugging off acceptability with a don't-give-a-fuck brutishness and while I'm also an unrepentant fan of novelty and juvenalia, "Say Yeah" is, unfortunately, only just OK as these things go, meaning it's hard to grumble about 21st-century ephemera addicts who've already stricken it from iTunes. As someone who once tried to Quixotically convince alt-weekly readers that they should give DJ Sammy some shine, I don't share the position that this trendlet represents a Euro-axis Of Evil threatening hip-hop's way of life. I know the song's heart is in the right place. But the high-speed hook never meshes with the down-low hip-hop groove, only getting interesting/tolerable during the tingly half-time breaks. Had those moments been stretched out over a full 3:00, "Say What" might have made for a decent, techno-tinged mixtape track that would utterly lack the look-at-me value producer Johnny Juliano alighted on the moment he found a copy of Who Needs Guitars Anyway? in the back of his closet next to his middle school yearbook.

And since repeated exposure turned "Never Be Alone" into anthemic water torture, the off chance of "Say Yeah" escaping into heavy rotation—either because of viral whatever or because Kanye's relative good taste primed the pump—would means this Frankenstein could turn Pronti, Kalmani, and DJ Jurgen's keyboards (one of trance's great mysteries being how it took three dudes to come up with one riff) into a generation gap irritant on the level of your "Crank That" variation of choice^*. For the second time. Which I'm not so sure about. Because above and beyond enjoying producers pulling off seemingly incongruous sonic combos and watching high school kids bait their elders, I enjoy these songs because of the immense pleasure I derive from both rapping and big, stupid synth hooks and would prefer to not have "Say Yeah" turning my opinion/inspiring idle thoughts of suicide six months from now. And yet even with with that worry in mind, I'd still like to close out with five pop-dance tunes that I'd love to hear some enterprising Fruity Looper have his or her way with because of their as yet untapped potential for making our charts a better place.

1. DJ Sammy - "Heaven"

Kinda platonic/interchangable as far as trance riffs go, but nonetheless waiting to be pitched down to booty-pop tempo.

2. Da Hool - "Meet Her At The Love Parade"

The main hook positively sophisticated compared to "Better Off Alone."

3. Rollergirl - "Dear Jessie"

Perhaps more suited to an R&B cut.

4. Aqua - "Dr. Jones"

and

5. Vengaboys - "We Like To Party"

They don't even have to be good. I just want someone to have the stones to take this sound all the way.

Wiz Khalifa [MySpace]
"Say Yeah" [YouTube]

(^* Interestingly, while elderly listeners across a variety subcultural affiliations seem to be giving this song the gas face—hardly surprising, since I recall Alice Deejay clearing not a few rooms full of Neutral Milk Hotel and Nas fans alike upon initial release—younger indie kids do seem to be embracing Kalifa's tune to an extent that they don't seem be repping for, I dunno, the Pop It Off Boyz; whether they're enjoying it as a goof or because they're blog-era omnivores who hear no difference between Urb-approved Frenchies and the kind of cornball poppers-fodder that gives minimal techno fans agita, nostalgia seems to be at least partly at work, proving once again that any pop reputation can be at least partially rehabilitated by good ol' warm childhood memories.)

An aside in the cover story in the March 2008 Spin makes a lofty claim for the band profiled therein. "Vampire Weekend are," writes Andy Greenwald with subtle portent, " the first band ever to be shot for a Spin cover before they'd released an album."

Huh! So it's a big deal that VW was photographed for a Spin cover before its debut was "officially" released, despite the fact that the issue is on sale a few weeks after said debut appeared? Wouldn't such portent be appropriate if a Vampire Weekend cover story in Spin came out before the album was not only not released, but hadn't been finished? Keyboard Krybaby thinks it would be, but a cover story in a big-league entertainment publication still must promote an "official" release: Vampire Weekend's minders would doubtless not stand for the cover story appearing sooner than the album's release. One exponent of old media must still scratch the back of another.

Still, it's clear what Spin's role is to be now. Rolling Stone will grant covers to artists that appeal to teens, tweens, their parents and in some cases grandparents. Until further notice, Blender will proffer images of artists likely to inspire many men to start a'strokin'. But Spin is now the crucible into which blawg-rawkahs enter the big leagues. For instance, the mag put Franz Ferdinand front and center three years ago, when its aforementioned rivals likely decided that the band's appeal was limited to the twentysomethings who even then had largely deserted print media. Heedless of this basic fact, the powers that be at Spin seems to have concluded that the mag will be the premiere print media whistle-stop for indie-rock bands once the blog diaspora is done with them. And that's an honorable purpose.

As for the story itself: Greenwald, a former staffer who wrote Nothing Feels Good, the definitive study of twerps crying like little bitches, spends a bit of time exploring the current calculus for discovering indie rock bands that has benefited Vampire Weekend. He interviews New Yorker 'fro-sporter and Tipping Point pundit Malcolm Gladwell (who believes that "we're in danger of discovering people before they are worthy of being discovered") and Matador honcho Gerard Cosloy ("one favorable notice on Stereogum can be instantly undermined by one or two sarcastic, pseudonymous commentators") among others, and in doing so does a nice job explaining this paradigm for readers who may be unaware of it—KK supposes that there must be, y'know, ten such readers.

W/R/T the band, its genesis and how it appropriates Afropop: Greenwald seems to have found frontman Ezra Koenig somewhat entitled and smug. Apparently, Koenig counts among his past musical projects a Columbia University-based rap duo called L'Homme Run, from which the tunes "Interracial Dating" and "Pizza Party" emanated (full disclosure: for one evening, an 18-year-old KK was the DJ for a rap group consisting of his fellow white teenagers; the resulting songs were very likely even more banal than Koenig's). Greenwald also reports that Koenig's semi-apocryphal VW manifesto specified that no t-shirts would be part of the band's presentation and that Johnny Marr's townshippy guitar tone via "This Charming Man" would be venerated. He also notes Koenig's diffident manner throughout—although Koenig might have been on his guard around a member of "the big bad media" that his band mistrusted enough to largely avoid until the past six months.

"...having wrestled with issues of authenticity and cultural appropriation as a deracinated fourth-generation Ivy Leaguer," writes Greenwald perceptively, "(Koenig's) concluded that he's allowed to do whatever the hell he wants. It's charming, but it's also indicative of the sort of confidence that only exists in the very young, the very successful, or both. Because he cannot imagine any resistance or skepticism to what he's doing, none seem to exist." Koenig seems to believe that his band is immune to any challenges of colonialism: "that debate has already happened. We're in a context that's coming after instances of people stealing from each other."

KK will step in here to say that, barring college boys' "amusing" takes on hip-hop, he's a big fan of most examples of musical miscegenation in the history of humankind. But he regrets that Koenig is mistaken if he thinks he is free of all considerations regarding his band's context and how it may relate to cultural colonialism. That particular debate is not over, whether Koenig thinks it should be or not. KK will also add that he likes a few of the band's songs and thus will suspend his ironclad rule that any performer who considers cable-knit sweaters and boat shoes appropriate onstage attire should be thrown out of show business forever.

And now, KK'll just touch on the following, none of which require extended verbiage...

• In an otherwise not-precisely-needed Front of Book trend piece on dirty rock videos you can see on the Device You Are Currently Gazing At, we learn that Gene Simmons is an investor in ngtv.com, which provides a lot of said videos. As of 4:16pm, on Feb. 21, 2008, the clip in which Simmons soporifically mates with a large-breasted woman was not available therein, but it is here.

• There used to be a fanzine called FatGregDulli. Now, in a quick interview with the former Afghan Whig and his Gutter Twins partner Mark Lanegan, we can see that, despite what may have been the best efforts of photographer Tom Fowlks to blend Dulli's black suit into shadow, the zine's title is more apt than ever.

• In a "local scene/fashion roundup" titled "Chicago Ill" (nice job, headline writer!), we learn of Flosstradamus, the Cool Kids, Dude N' Nem and Kid Sister, who each, according to the piece's subhed, have "a sense of fun not seen since rap's golden age." Someone in Spin's braintrust seems to think that hip-hop has been nothing but a nihilistic trudge through the morgue, which KK thinks is a bit much. The piece is penned by Jessica Hopper, the Chicago-boosting publicist-turned-provocateur-turned-(evidently)-writer/not-journalist.

• KK has not heard REM's new album, Accelerate. But he does think that Josh Modell's assessment of the album, which takes the marquee spot in this issue's reviews section, hits so many "they've returned to their roots and thank gawd for that" beats that it almost reads like a David Fricke hosanna for Rolling Stone.

Whither, asks Your Correspondent this week, anglophilia among the American alt-rock electorate? Spin will know the answer—or at least have a workable metric—when the numbers are in for its February issue.

For the cover image is of one Pete Doherty, captured presumably mid-tweaky twitch, his scaly fingers crackishly scratching an itch below his chin.

In the United Kingdom, hunger for anecdotes regarding this unfortunate creature is insatiable. Not only does British society have a much longer history of fascination with famous fuckups than the US (YC thinks VH1 wouldn't have had nearly as much success with Celebrity Rehab and Celebrity Fit Club a decade or two ago), Doherty is an ineffably English character. Take a look at that mug: that's a kind of face you don't often see on white Americans. His music is almost entirely premised on 30 years of English rock and roll (the Jam, Buzzcocks, the Clash, Manic Street Preachers) that didn't translate Stateside—beyond anglophiles, that is. He's a major figure in the UK (in his editor's letter, Doug Brod calls him a "folk hero" there) and thus can be counted on to sell music magazines.

But here? The New York Post's interest in Doherty is purely due to the fact that he probably snorted coke out of Kate Moss's cooch a time or two. Otherwise, your mom doesn't know who he is—although she might be aware of Amy Winehouse, since her songs are premised on the kind of music played by the band at your cousin's wedding.

So YC doubts that this issue will do very well on the newsstand. Brod says in his letter that he and his staff wearied of reading about Doherty's exploits, liked Babyshambles' new album Shotter's Nation and that the issue's cover story, "Man Out of Time," was expanded into a longer form once it was determined that Doherty's health was improving (YC wouldn't rule out the possibility that a preferred cover feature fell through).

So much for that! Nick Duerden, a prolific British writer for the likes of Q and Blender, first encounters a lucid, seemingly drug-free Doherty. Mid-interview, Doherty's informed by his manager that a photograph of him injecting heroin three days prior would be hitting the papers the next morning. And so it goes: Duerden recounts the vicissitudes of dealing with a junkie with all the portent English rock writers expend towards their pet dysfunctional geniuses. (Incidentally, Duerden's Q colleague Dorian Lynskey pens a Hot Chip story in this issue: YC wonders if Blender, for whom both wrote, became less sympathetic to favored British scribes last fall in anticipation of budget cuts?)

Twenty-five pages later comes a piece regarding Lenny Kravitz, a man who—while sharing with Doherty the knowledge of what it's like to be balls-deep in a supermodel, how to play the guitar and write songs, and exactly nothing else—is likely beneath the contempt of most of the magazine's past and present readers. (This would also hold for surfin' troubadour Jack Johnson, who is interviewed in this issue as well.) Thus some substantial horse-trading between Spin and Virgin Records might have taken place, since it's very likely that Spin's immediate competitors and other mass-market publications declined the privilege of chronicling an interaction with the famously vapid Kravitz at feature length.

YC also thinks it likely Spin's edit staff believes Kravitz to be kinda dim, so they let Jonathan Ames—memoirist, boxer and author of last year's Marilyn Manson cover story—loose for "Lenny Kravitz is A Virgin." Therein, Ames goes to a club with Kravitz, casting himself as a tweedy