Idolator

Last night's Emmy telecast was punctuated by an interlude where the Oprah-approved crooner Josh Groban ran through a medley of classic television themes; during the four-minute performance, he managed to channel Les Claypool, Will Smith during his Fresh Prince phase, and the lead singer of the dancehall act Inner Circle. Also he used a lot (a lot!) of vibrato in weird places. (I guess moms like that sort of thing?) But even more importantly, there were some curious omissions from the medley, which I've taken the liberty to list below. More »

At around 3 a.m. I found myself going on one of those YouTube binges that are necessitated by not being able to sleep and not wanting to drop $30-plus at the iTunes Store, and it was through lots of "related link" clicking that I happened upon "Daily Nightly" by the Monkees, a song that I had "dug" a lot as a terminally unhip 11-year-old and, I learned after some Googling, one that actually had something of an historic import, what with it being one of the first pop songs to employ the Moog synthesizer. According to Eric Lefcowitz's Monkees Tale, the Monkees' Micky Dolenz actually bought the third Moog to ever come off the assembly line—he was right behind Buck Owens and Wendy Carlos on the waiting list—and his full-on "hey, let's twist this knob and see what happens" experimentation with the synthesizer resulted in the Michael Nesmith-penned song breaking through its psychedelia-by-the-numbers melody. More »

The OneRepublic-vocalist-produced "Karma" by the new boy band NLT seems to be catching a little bit of fire, or at least has a viral-marketing team that knows about the world of pop-music blogs behind its push. The song is an early-'00s-informed bit of pop-radio playlist filler, and the group, which is apparently something of a redemptive product for B2K svengali Chris Stokes, seems to be the Mach 2008 version of the classic boy band. It's made up of four just-shy-of-20 dudes who are just cute enough and just threatening enough, and who have as one member someone named "V." Watching this video, I noted that NLT also carried on important boy-band traditions, as if to honor the boys to men who have traveled in the streaming-girl-strewn path they hope to ride an Escalade down. More »

Time for another installment of the Coulda-Shoulda-Woulda Files, where we search through our record collection in search of a lost gem. More »