An excellent example of this is the previously nominated Niki D'Andrea, whose reign as the music editor at the Phoenix New Times was marked by her angering most of the area's hip-hop scene while giving her friends and their nights out on the town the coverage they so richly deserve.

However, as far as this ad on the Village Voice Media clone of Craigslist shows, her job now appears to be open. Niki's apparently moving on to a different position at the paper, which means there's work for all you frustrated music writers out there! The New Times building is conveniently located near Phoenix's vibrant downtown, which will soon be serviced by the city's new light rail system. Plus, it's only ridiculously hot here a third of the year. What more could you want (sane employers not hacking jobs away left and right excluded)?

Music Editor [Backpage]

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks
Broken Social Scene
The Helio Sequence
Beach House
Times New Viking
Jaguar Love
The Dodos
Annuals
Film School
Parts & Labor
Dragons of Zynth
These Are Powers

Wayne's drastic improvement from his Cash Money days, coupled with the South's moment in the sun, ensured that narrative-hungry writers would annoint someone sub-Mason-Dixon as the new king of hip-hop. With Scarface and Andre 3000 falling back and half of UGK locked up, Wayne seemed like the best bet. In a way, his rise seemed tailor-made for the zeitgeist of this jangled Internet age, his songs blessed with a sense of ephemera that jibes with the notion of constant content fit to be devoured and forgotten ten minutes later. There are as many Wayne songs as there are blogs, and like the blogosphere, the quality is wildly uneven. For every show-stopping moment like "Cannon" or "Upgrade U," there are ten tracks filled with repetitive simile-laden boasts that Wayne's champions would like to call free-associative genius, but really just prove that it is somehow possible to be both the hardest working man in hip-hop and incredibly lazy at the same time.

Given the chance to appear on Graduation and American Gangster, two rap albums from 2007 that were good enough to receive burn beyond the turn of the decade, Weezy whiffed—squandering the rare opportunity to broaden his fanbase beyond his key constituency of Southerners, 13-year olds, and white music critics with 180+ IQs, prestigious liberal arts degrees, and questionable taste in hip-hop. Wayne apologists scoffed that their hero had already had so many great moments that year, but his detractors sagely pointed out that anyone purporting to be the best rapper alive shouldn't suck this much on both of the year's big-ticket rap records.

That's perhaps the most frustrating thing about the Wayne question: only two opinions seem to exist, both of which are wrong. (Wayne is neither savior nor Satan. What he is a talented rapper with absolutely no concept of quality control.) The first swallows his hyperbole and concludes that he is the greatest rapper alive, a prolific, infallible genius who operates in a Bizarro galaxy heretofore reserved for such king weirdos as Mike Tyson, Cam'ron, and Kim Jung-Il. The other labels him complete garbage, a walking, talking, Baby-kissing plague on humanity responsible for SARS, Ebola, and the assassinations of both Kennedys.^** Ultimately, what this yields is bad criticism, with his admirers refusing to acknowledge his myriad atrocious moments and his "haters" never conceding an inch, with both teams waiting for the "classic" album that will either confirm his place in the pantheon or halt the critical love train.

The notion of needing to drop a classic album seems slightly antiquated, but in fact it isn't. While short stories, short films, and single MP3s obviously have their merits, no amount of postmodernist revision will ever alter the fact that the novel, the feature film, and the album will remain the standard-bearers of art. (Sorry.) Lil Wayne has not dropped a classic album, though if you lopped 20 minutes off Carter II, you could arguably state your case. Logically, Carter III would be make-or-break time, the chance for Wayne to either shut up the peanut gallery^*** or leave the heads of the hype machine with a whole lot of omelet on their face. Neither of these two things will probably happen.

While it remains to be seen what exactly would convert Wayne's naysayers, it is certain that no matter how bad Carter III is, some corners of the critical community will stop at nothing to convince you of its greatness. In particular, no two critics have been more strident in their homerism than Tom Breihan, of the Village Voice and Pitchfork and Marc Hogan, the main writer of Pitchfork's Forkcast. ReadBreihan's love letter to "Lollipop," a song that he himself manages to call

a blatant sellout-move capitulation to everything lame in today's pop-music world: gallingly obvious central lyrical sex-as-candy analogy, T-Pain-esque layered-up autotuned vocals, simplistic snap-music drum-pattern, hushed trancey synth-whooshes playing something that sounds suspiciously like the melody to Flo Rida's "Low," no rapping whatsoever and... screaming butt-rock guitar solos.

Forget the fact that "Lollipop" does have rapping, however terrible it may be; forget the fact that Breihan somehow manages to compare "Lollipop" to Earth Wind & Fire's "Let's Groove," a piece of spin that would make James Carville smile. The review concludes by telling us that we should "celebrate the fact that Lil Wayne has made his "Candy Shop" without compromising his inner weirdness."

In fact, there is nothing weird about "Lollipop," a song that feels more cynically calculating than almost anything released in 2008. It's lyrical content is a clumsy homework assignment from 50 Cent's School Of How To Write Songs For 14-Year-Old Girls With Tacky Sex Metaphors For Hooks. (In particular, "Shorty Want a Thug/Bottles in the Club/Shorty Need a Hug" makes Benzino look like Arthur Rimbaud.) Meanwhile, it completely style-jacks T-Pain, a guy who stole every one of his ideas from Roger Troutman, never mind Snoop Dogg's "Sensual Seduction." Hell, even the "Lollipop" video is corny, a glitzy, formulaic romp through Las Vegas that feels suspiciously like a cliched combo of the videos for 112's "Only You" and 2Pac's "How Do U Want It."

Incidentally, there is one defense for "Lollipop": It's a big, absolutely retarded pop song that you enjoy dancing to at clubs. This is its sole intent. As rap music, it's garbage; as pop, it's middle-of-the-road filler fit to be played until Labor Day and not a moment later. What it isn't is "sly, heady... melodrama," as Breihan puts it, or a "savvy pop move," as Hogan calls it. What Snoop did was a "savvy pop move," the sort of desperate sellout look that artists need to do when there's nothing left in the well; "the greatest rapper alive" shouldn't have to resort to singles you can Xerox (no Hillary Clinton).

If "Lollipop" is a shameless, poorly executed, but well-thought out play for the charts, "A Millie" is the opposite, a half-baked and sloppy street single with Wayne once again in mixtape mode, stringing together simile after simile for five and a half minutes of banal shit-talking. Of course, there are a few clever lyrical turns. "I don't owe you like two vowels" is as good as anything Lupe Fiasco has written, but like Weezy's entire discography, "A Millie" is maddeningly inconsistent. Its beat is a hiccuping, overly repetitive, minimalist mess that sounds like it could only have been selected by someone under the influence of too much drank and drugs. Meanwhile, Wayne attempts to mask his empty-calorie lyrics by relying on his now-familiar grab-bag of vocal tics, forcing syllables to stretch that shouldn't stretch, modulating his voice without purpose, everything strictly for schtick and effect. At one point, he even boasts that "none of this shit is written down," but that goes without saying. After all, any rapper who writes a lyric as lazy as "we pop 'em like Redenbacher" deserves his MC pass revoked. (Can we all admit that Jay and Big's claims that they never wrote down lyrics have caused more harm than any trivia tidbit in music history?)

But Hogan dismisses anyone with a gripe: "haters are already foaming at the mouth... the rest of us know better than to rush the flow." God forbid, anyone gets between Hogan and Wayne's uh..."flow." "A Millie" is just mediocre, a boiler mix-tape track that would be met with yawns were it released by Papoose, most frustrating than is the one-sided nature of its criticism, with its arrogant tone and nebulous taunts at "haters." Flip through the Pitchfork archives, and you'll be hard-pressed to find inasmuch as a negative word about Wayne, with the one universally loathed Wayne record, Like Father Like Son, weirdly never getting a review despite its single, "Stuntin' Like My Daddy," receiving a glowing, four-star review from Breihan.

Granted, Wayne's detractors are notoriously venomous and often misguided, but their anger partly stems from a critical vogue that refuses to praise anything that isn't crack rap and/or nakedly commercial. In the past six months, hip-hop has seen strong output from a new generation of rappers—Jay Electronica, Wale, The Knux, Pacific Division, Blu and Clean Guns—yet not one of these worthy artists has gotten their own post on the Forkcast or Status Ain't Hood, despite obviously needing the exposure a whole lot more than the platinum-plus "Young Money Millionaire." It remains to be seen whether Carter III will be the masterpiece capable of validating the slavish Wayne worship that has taken place over the past few years. But what is certain is that judging from the reviews of its first two singles, you'll be hearing the praises of its unmistakable brilliance.

Besides, no matter what, it can't be worse than Mike Jones or Paul Wall.

^* On another note, if "Loungin" is not the most quintessential mid-'90s rap video, than what is?
^** Though if one were to judge Wayne strictly off his appearance—which is not unlike that of a drank and pills-addled Whoopi Goldberg—SARS seems like a reasonable guess.
^***Likely filled with fans of Peanut Butter Wolf.

HAVING SEX

LOANING SUNSCREEN

HAVING THEM GIVE ME A PACK OF SILK CUTS

DOING A LINE

PLAYING TRIVIal PURSUIT

VISITING THEM AT HoME IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE'

GOING TO THE LOUVRE WITH

CUTTING UP FRUIT FOR A FRUIT SALAD

'MAKING PASTA

LISTENING TO PUCCINI IN MATCHING KIMONOS DRINKING PETRUS READING THE NEW YORK TIMES'

SHARING MAKEUP AND CLOTHES( BOTH SEXES)

SNUBBING

NOT SHARING DRUGS WITH

KIckING THE ASSES OF ( SONICALLY)

hitchiking from sardina with

Obviously some of these were one-off experiences and obviously some were frequent go-to's for a bored Courtney. (Once you find a good Trivial Pursuit partner you don't give them up easily.) But with who did she listen "TO PUCCINI IN MATCHING KIMONOS DRINKING PETRUS READING THE NEW YORK TIMES'"? Perhaps we'll never know. Or perhaps maybe you know. (I'm guessing David Coverdale.)

have a beer with? [Courtney Love/Photo: AP]

THE GOOD: 2007 is over! Also Feist and Wilco were both kept out of the albums Top 10, plus an honestly surprising, kinda heartening Winehouse-over-Rihanna singles upset, if only by 4 mentions. (And even if No. 2 Rihanna spanked No. 3 "All My Friends" by a whopping 32 mentions.)
THE BAD: As with the Idolator Pop Critics Poll, Peter Bjorn and John earn a Top 10 placing on the singles list despite the evil "Young Folks" first whistling its way into our lives in 2006. Damned twee Swedes.
THE WHAAAA? Radiohead beats M.I.A. to the No. 2 albums spot despite an equal number of points, thanks to four more ballot mentions that break the tie. Not quite fraud at the polls, but clearly the electoral college is not the only voting system that needs reforming.

P.S. Psyche. Full lists not after the jump. Feel free to check out the results and come back here to argue them. Or not. It's 2008 and we have plenty of Hannah Montana stories new things to discuss, even if I'm not 100 percent sure what they are yet. Maybe we'll find out it was Rockwell that really killed Heath Ledger or Courtney Love will put out an album where every song features the Soulja Boy "YAHH!" or the bottom will drop out of Web 2.0 and we'll all be forced to get real jobs. This year's gonna be silly, I just know it.

Pazz And Jop 2007 [Village Voice]

Although briefly mentioned in the Brian J. Barr installment of this series, Niki really deserves attention all to her Wolfmother-lovin' self, and this week's "How Can We Make Year-End Wrap Up Concept Even Less Interesting And Relevant" feature running across several VVM properties makes for a perfect opportunity. It's possible that some of the blame should go to Luke Y. Thompson, who introduces the concept, declaring:

Over the past few years, the availability of year-end critics lists has multiplied faster than the worry lines on Ben Bernanke's brow. By mid-December, the Net and the magazine rack at your Barnes & Noble were brimming over with a head-spinning, eye-glazing cornucopia of rankings of such de rigueur albums as The Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, The National's Boxer, Spoon's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, M.I.A.'s Kala, Radiohead's In Rainbows, LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver, and Battles' Mirrored.
If you want to parse the exact sequence of those records in your favorite publication or Web site, feel free to do so. We're going in a different direction.
In five cities from Minneapolis to San Francisco, we asked musicians, comedians, athletes (and in one case, a Michael Stipe-impersonating electrician) to tell us what music they loved most this year. It could be albums, songs, or the collected works of an artist, and it need not have come out this year. We just wanted to know what was moving our interviewees right now.

While you have to wonder how many of those "de rigueur albums" will be atop a sister publication's own rankings in a few weeks, there's still hope to be held out. Maybe the freedom the premise offers will make for some interesting writing. Minneapolis interviewee Dan Wilson used to be in Trip Shakespeare, surely he heard something good this year while penning new Dixie Chicks songs, right? Right?

Feel free to judge for yourself the quality of the contributions from the four other cities, but leave it to Niki D'Andrea to use the opportunity to continue her in-print fantasy love affair with WNBA star Diana Taurasi. Earlier this year, Niki penned a mind-numbingly extensive cover story on Taurasi while the hometown Mercury were on their way to a WNBA championship. To summarize, the Mercury are awesome, and Taurasi, while apparently straight, is the dreamiest. While there's no evidence Ms. Taurasi returned the affection, she makes another appearance in the paper, even while unavailable to be interviewed, because she's somewhere in Russia, apparently. Have you ever wondered which rapper WNBA stars prefer, Kanye or 50 Cent, but didn't have the opportunity to vaguely cyber-stalk one via her blog to find out? Be sure to thank D'Andrea, because she saved you the trouble!

For basketball star Diana Taurasi, 2007 was a stellar year....The Mercury made it onto the Wheaties box, Taurasi re-signed a half-million dollar deal to play in Russia during the WNBA off-season, and now she's got one of the most popular athlete blogs on sports site yardbarker.com.
One of the reasons Taurasi's blog rocks is her candid banter about all sorts of things, but most often music — and the fact that she'll carry on conversations about music with her fans in the comments section.
Because Taurasi's bundled up and playing b-ball in the former Soviet Union right now, we'll refer you to some of her Yardbarker commentary on what rocked her world in '07:
Kanye West: (posted September 11): "So here we are, on the eve of 9/11 — still at war — and we're presented with one of the most important questions of our generation: Kanye or 50?
"Really. Kanye. Seriously. I'm buyin' that one and burnin' a copy for the car. Is there really a comparison? Fiddy? Are there recording studios at Shady Acres? For real, 'Stronger' is the jam of the summer. While you can question the sunglasses indoors, you can't fight Kanye's creativity. I won't venture to say lyrical genius (nobody is touching 'Pac in my book, most likely ever . . . in life), but the guy has undeniable talent. I like him. In the wasteland of what has become hip-hop (who can even listen to the radio anymore?), Kanye delivers."

Fascinating! A unique take, especially the part about the indoor sunglasses. You can't blame Taurasi, largely because she wasn't involved, but you have the question the judgment of a music editor who finds the two most interesting musical figures in the fifth largest city in the country to be Diana Taurasi and Jordin Sparks—who also addresses the Kanye/50 Cent controversy, thankfully—and when Taurasi wasn't available just took some offhand remarks about Alicia Keys out of her blog to fill the space. Admittedly, Phoenix might not have had a groundbreaking year for music, but with venues shutting down left and right and a few bands breaking nationally, I have to assume there's a bigger, better story out there than the crazy night they had a "post-hardcore" show at the church Jordin Sparks goes to. Then again, it spares whoever is picking up the New Times and not skipping straight to the listings of massage parlors and strip clubs the pain of suffering through another profile of Phoenix's own Nunzilla, who are notable for dressing like nuns, and for...well...nothing else, really, but they made the cover this year, too.

Niki D'Andrea, you were great this year in coming up with profanities to scream at the vending machine that wouldn't dispense any damn Mountain Dew, but sadly, you make our roll of the worst writers in the Village Voice empire.

Celebrity Playlist [Phoenix New Times]
Desert Heat [Phoenix New Times]

Meet Matt Neff, former shoe salesman and recent college graduate, whose unique brand of circa-2002-Pitchforkian indecipherablity and fierce dislike for anything outside his personal preferences that puts him atop the leaderboard for the "Worst Village Voice Media Music Writer" contest that I just invented (and probably will never be mentioned again after this post).

The clips that earned Matt his nomination:

From "Some Call It Pronk: Coping with The Cardiacs":

It was a typical Tuesday morning. I was browsing through the used videocassette section of my local public library, musing over a fifty cent copy of "Hanging Up" when I heard a familiar phlegm-filled cough. My insides full of forebodings, I slowly turned around and faced my old high school nemesis and drinking buddy, Doug "Creosote" Huggins. His rangy limbs had not diminished in size and his shoulder length auburn hair was still flecked with pieces of orange carbohydrate from his job at the Cheezit cracker factory. "So, Neff," he sneered in the inimitable Creosote way that so drove the women mad, "I see your taste in videocassettes has not improved." I laughed in a manner that I hoped sounded courageous. "Not improved nothing Creosote. I was just considering purchasing this copy of Yankee Doodle Dandy, winner of three Academy Awards and item number 100 on the American Film Institute's '100 Years...100 Movies' ranking list." He appeared dumbstruck but quickly recovered, putting on a contemptuous face. "And is your stomach still as weak as it used to be?" he asked, referring to the many shameful defeats I had suffered at his hands at the drinking table. "No," I said, speaking boastfully. "Now my stomach is lined with iron unlike yours which is lined with cotton candy." Once again he appeared flabbergasted but quickly spat out a retort. "Oh? Then perhaps we should test both your taste in videos and your digestional abilities with...a video-watching contest on the popular internet video site 'You Tube'?"
"But what will be the prize," I mused, "for the winner of such a contest?" "Ah," he spoke, noticing a weathered old photograph that had portentously just fallen from my wallet. "Perhaps we have found a candidate. I wager your prized collector's edition 1992 World Series commemorative Coca-Cola bottles—still sealed of course." My insides curdled with horror at the thought of such a loss but I kept my expression placid. "I accept." We retired to the computer lab of the library and began the contest. Creosote came out of the gates hard with a video of a man devouring a live alpaca. I swallowed my surprise and came back with montage of close-ups from the canned-peach eating contests held annually in a certain Madagascar leper colony. He kept his bewilderment admirably under control and showed me a clip of two children writing swear words on their sleeping father's buttocks with green sharpie markers. I wiped away my forehead sweat and debuted the video of a Cheezit factory burning to the ground. Creosote's face drained of color but he parried with a well-directed piece on Japanese bukkake/waterslide fetishes.

A 464 word lead. A premise involving an imaginary friend. The use of the word "portentously". A Neff classic, even ignoring the actual music content.

From "Fame, Shmame: Overlooked AZ Hall of Fame Nominees":

"Hall of Fame" conceptual problems notwithstanding, their choices usually suck anyway. As a certain local music snob with ears full of sarcastic wax (and a close friend) remarked to me the other day, "Hall of Fame? More like Hall of Shame!" I laughed at his brazen wit and we both went out for chianti and pizza. Actually what he said right before that was: it's not that Alice Cooper, Stevie Nicks and Glen Campbell are simply old, it's that they're old, irrelevant, and BORING. They haven't made any interesting music since 1976, and even then just barely. Sure they're famous; they're also limp, money-ridden geezers who couldn't tear the roof off a Play-Skool pizza parlour. They support the notion that every twenty years all the popular music celebrities on the planet should be loaded onto a rocket piloted into the sun to make room for all the young hellions who are still artistically relevant, in their prime and deserving of fame and fortune.

Attacking the "Hall of Fame" concept, and non-contemporary artists not perceived as "cool". Brilliant. Note the recurrent use of the conversation with an alleged "friend".

Finally, a selection from "Winks 'n' Links: Sunday Blog Logistics":

The kindly goblins who orchestrate the inner machinations of this here web-hole were nice enough to finally equip me with two things: 1) a list of links more befitting my "tendencies" and 2) an email account. So it is now that I beseech, nay, beg you to grace me with personal correspondence at matt.neff (at) newtimes.com. Suggestions, review requests, pizza recipes, and ferret-care tips are all welcome, but make sure you know what you're doing—I don't want to be knocked out in bed all week humming some nasty pop punk melody or sniveling with the woeful knowledge that I trimmed Chompy's furry lil digging implements to the detriment of his (currently robust) health.
Also, we've blown out those dusty old links and pasted up a fresh set o' new ones. I considered walking through link by link and explaining the relative merits of each, but I know you're all grown adults. Instead, I made a Mix 'n' Match game, complete with walkthrough explanations, to really help you learn—lest your minds wilt like the sad begonias they may or may not already be.

I've run out of things to say. The links as "Mix 'n' Match" game made my head explode a little bit.

Surely, there must be some competition for this prestigious honor, so keep your thesaurus at hand, Matt Neff...you never know when someone might get a "obscure word of the day" calendar for Christmas and give you a run for your money!

Up On The Sun [Phoenix New Times]

Lindsay Anne Arnold is currently studying communications at New York University. Ms. Arnold holds the record for the shortest amount of time ever spent in the Voice music intern's chair—a scant nine days. (Even Megan Mullally's talk show held out longer than that, Lindsay.) When we asked her if she would be interested in anonymously running down the latest Voice music section, she agreed, on the conditions that a.) we pay her in "dorm bucks" and b.) she got to sign her name to her work.

Being a music intern sucks. You're forced to listen to, like, the worst music ever, for one thing. And going into work always feels like you're going into a frat house or a porn shop or something. When I filled out my application for the Voice, I specifically wrote no music section, please! Well, you can guess where they stuck me. Everyone who works at an alt-weekly is a sadist who used to snap bras, even the girls, and especially the girls who administer the internship programs. When I was going to school in Baltimore before I transferred to NYU, I interned at one of the papers there and I got stuck in the music editor's office. The guy always looked like he had just woken up under a pile of gym socks and he was always scratching himself in places that I don't really want to think about. He needed to get laid, bad. Also one time he hit me up for five dollars.

Anyway, in this week's Voice snooz-ic section, Rob Harvilla's "Down In Front" column features a pregnant woman who plays bass. I didn't really get it. Also I don't know if this has anything to do with anything, but when I worked there, this guy, I dunno if he was the janitor or the editor-in-chief or what, would come up to me sometimes and sheepishly ask to touch my belly. You know, whatever, I had a belly. Freshman 15. So a couple times I let him do it because I felt sorry for him or I thought maybe I'd get transferred or whatever, thank God, and he'd walk away muttering something about "I can feel it kicking...I can feel it kicking..." I'm not saying the guy had a pregnant chick fetish or anything, but he always smelled like Desitin.

Ben Westhoff wrote something about...MTV? I couldn't really follow it—it jumped around a lot. Something about how it was cool that MTV was showing videos instead of that awesome and hilarious show where the girls walk through the boys bedrooms with the blacklight to see where they, you know, messed their beds. One time it was—ewww—on the wall. I told my little brother the show was being broadcast from inside our house. He didn't think that was too funny. This Westhoff guy kinda writes like how my aunt Gina (who is also a music writer, don't ask me why) talks on Thanksgiving after a few glasses of box wine: "We won, we won..." I always have to help her put her shoes on and drive her home.

Mordechai Shinefield wrote something about the Used, who are apparently a screamo band and that stuff is played out. He's got a good name though. Music critics always seem to have made-up sounding names. Like Grayson Currin or Alexander Lloyd Lindhardt or Michaelangelo Matos or Sam Ubl, which is more consonants than vowels. I wouldn't, like, date these guys, because their names make them sound like they wear sweaters knotted around their necks or have the pinky fingers of their victims in a Christmas cookie tin under their beds. They're good names, though.

Michael D. Ayers wrote about a band called Parts and Labor who play "art-jam-noise." I like jam bands, so I downloaded some of this stuff. It sounded like a sheep taking a dump with a Green Day album playing underneath it! Maybe the sheep pooping part is the "art" part, I dunno. Like one time, back in Baltimore, the music editor told me, "art in music is like pornography—you know it when you get a hard-on." That's when I asked to be moved down to the IT offices.

Christopher R. Weingarten wrote about a bunch of hip-hop songs. These were the first songs that I had any idea what they were or who they were by. So Christopher R. Weingarten is okay in Lindsay's book. Then I looked back at the Parts and Labor article and saw that this guy is their drummer! I have about just as much of a problem with drummers as I do with rock critics so I can only imagine what this guy is like. When I was working at this kitchen supply store in the summer between freshman and sophomore year, I started dating this drummer who worked in the stockroom. But then he turned out be 32, divorced, living above his parents' garage, and the kind of guy who clipped his toenails over the lunch room trash can on his break. And then he got fired for stealing whippets to sell to grade school kids out of his Hyundai. And then he turned out to not even really be a drummer, but that's really neither here nor there.

Michael Hoinski wrote about a country band that apparently sounds like the Ramones. Zzzzz, right? BRB, I need to go get some coffee.

Mikael Wood wrote about a band called Lavender Diamond, which is a good name. After reading it, I really still have no idea what their music sounds like though. Judging by the picture I'm gonna guess indie-rock. There's a guy wearing Chuck Taylors with a suit. Not a good look, guys. First girl (other than the pregnant lady, I dunno if that counts) in the entire section. Note!

Phil Freeman wrote an article on a salsa label called Fania. He talks about not liking salsa at first because his neighbors used to play it all the time. The guy that used to live below me in my dorm used to play the same heavy metal song 18 or 62 times every day. I mean, I assume it was the same song. It all sounds like that Parts and Labor sheep taking a dump to me. So I put up with this for four or five months—waah waah, kill for satan, eat baby heads, drink the blood of the non-believers—until I finally had enough. I "got my Irish up" as my mother always says, even though we're Jewish. So I storm downstairs and prepare to beat on the door and suddenly the metal song stops! I press my ear against the door and I hear this music playing faintly. It was that guy my dad likes so much...ummm...Michael McDonald! And the heavy metal guy in the background kinda sobbing into his pillow and singing along through the sobs. That was kinda weird. This Freeman guy seems like that. Angry—but the kind of angry guy who secretly cries to Michael McDonald songs. And that stacks empty pizza boxes outside his room until his RA has to leave a note on his door.

In summary, I thought this week's Voice music section sucked about as much as as any alt-weekly music section...Wait, I have to look at the blogs too?? Okay so there's this blog called Status Ain't Hood and it's written by this gentle giant named Tom Breihan who always used to be lurking around and peering over the partitions of the cubicles at the Voice office like the guy in that movie Big Fish. He's talking about Kanye West and he's going on and on and saying stuff like "ethereal synth arpeggio." He's kinda doing his own thing apart from the section, I guess, like when President Bush talks about "rogue nations." When I'm an editor at an alt-weekly (supposedly you have to be before you can get a real job at a newspaper) I'm going to institute two rules. 1.) No blogs. And 2.) Nobody who writes for "Pitchfork" gets to work there. Oh and every music editor has to work in the basement like Sloth from Goonies. Can I go now?

village voice > music [villagevoice.com]

- There are three elements to the pun: The "4.20" bit, which is a riff on the old "4:20 = stoner time" gag; the "do you know where your kids are?" structure; and the fact that Panda Bear tickets go on sale today. You should never punnify more than two elements at a time, unless you've got something really yowza, joke-wise.
- The "4.20" gag assumes that most readers will automatically make the connection (if it even exists) between Panda Bear and stoner music—a dodgy proposition, given how few people know about PB.
- Even the best bad-pun headline must have a smidgen of logical flow. This one is a few degrees too obtuse—if we didn't know that Panda Bear tickets were going on sale, or that he was even playing, we'd be wondering: Are people reporting massive disappearances of Panda Bear tickets? Were we given Panda Bear tickets and never informed of it, and now facing the prospect of already having lost said tickets? Is Panda Bear missing?
- We don't write about Panda Bear. Or concert-ticket on-sale dates. There are about a million blogs that do that already, and do it without complaining about having to work at 10 a.m.

It's 4.20. Do You Know Where Your Panda Bear Tickets Are? [Villagevoice.com]

Mary Timony - 9 x 3 [MP3, link expired]
Mary Timony [MySpace]
Earlier: The Village Voice SXSW Lineup: This Explains A Lot

We knew the Voice's music cred was shriveling, but yikes—the Bravery? Why not just have one of the editorial interns fart into a helmet, and call it a night?

As this week's Village Voice cover story proves, it's hard to find a NYC writer who doesn't have some sort of connection with Ultragrrrl—even if it's just through random nightlife socializing. And since we'd love to read an Ultra piece that takes an outsiders' stance, we asked several high-profile scribes about whether they have enough distance to remain truly objective. Their responses after the click-through.

GAY TALESE: Afraid not. During one of my many Writer's Life funks, she was kind enough to take me to MisShapes, where I got to meet one of Duffs—Hilary? Angelica?—up close in the DJ booth. Plus, she's so nice!

MAUREEN DOWD: Sorry. To me, she represents the freedom and self-reflection of mid-Iraqi war twentysomething feminism, and her ability to succeed at a male-dominated music magazine by having pancakes with Brandon Flowers is empowering. Plus, she's so nice!

ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC: Depends. I would need 2-3 years of fly-on-the-wall stuff with the Oohlas before even considering it.

NORMAN MAILER: Just what the fuck is an ultra squirrel?

We don't expect New Times NYC the Village Voice to take the antics of Canadian eyeliner fiend Avril Lavigne seriously, but that didn't stop us from being left dumbstruck by Garrett Kamps' review of Lavigne's new single, which reaches crit-dickery levels that we haven't seen in at least a few weeks. The review in full:

Holy shit. Actually, think about those two words for a second: holy shit. Sacred, profane, magnanimous pointlessness. What a concept! This song is like a Zen Buddhist koan. A Zen Buddhist koan that sounds like the Go-Go's and features the line, "She's, like, so whatever." Big-budget production is getting so awesome these days. Five years from now, sound will be so loud, sharp, and dangerous we'll just drop boomboxes playing this stuff onto Tehran. "Girlfriend" is produced by Dr. Luke. I mean, this tune is produced by a guy who calls himself "Dr. Luke"! (He has a PhD in jammers; herpetology didn't stick.) Dr. Luke is who you'd get if you made Rick Rubin shave his beard, pop Paxil, and fly around in a jet pack wearing a Lycra jumpsuit. Dr. Luke raped me.

There's so much edge in that paragraph, we thought we were going to get cut—a meditation on the koan-like properties of the phrase "holy shit" (so out-there!) and a self-directed rape joke (provocative!)? It even manages to wrangle the words "awesome," "Rick Rubin," and "Tehran" in there, which is like whoa. We can't wait for Kamps' next singles-column installment; we're just wondering if he's going to shoehorn his inevitable goatse.cx reference into his defense of Katharine McPhee or his pillorying of the Arcade Fire.

Pop Music Of The Future [Village Voice]
[Image via Hedonistica]

Earlier: Village Voice Doesn't Know Jack
[Photo via]

After the jump, a full screenshot of the Word document we were leaked, complete with "Properties" screen. (Note the word count—1,100, which seems to be an awfully long-winded way of saying "We're taking our ball and going home.")

Earlier: Village Voice Doesn't Know Jack

Pazz and Jop

Bill Jensen

Spit and sweat. Vodka and pills. Chunks of sod, delta mud, lighter fluid and a well-placed red snapper. That's what popular music is made of. Oh, and this year, add plenty of piss and moan to the mix, since some people who used to make a living going to shows and writing prose about music traded in their +1s for whiny chain emails and ILM message board posts about how the Village Voice is killing music criticism.

Welcome to the Pazz and Jop poll.

In an era when dailies are cutting arts critics by the dozens, the Village Voice is hiring new arts writers for newly created positions. The paper is owned by Village Voice Media, a company that spends millions of dollars a year paying music journalists across 17 American cities. VVM doesn't like thumbsuckers who sit on their ass and stare into their distended navels while hungrier writers are out in the clubs. It's just a little quirk of ours. Get over it.

Many of our writers, along with hundreds from other media outlets, make up this year's Pazz and Jop poll, the 33rd (or 34th) annual poll in which America's top music critics weigh in on the year's best music. Pazz and Jop is the most important critic's poll of the year. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to copy it.

You may have heard that a local gossip website was going to launch its own music poll. You heard it because mainstream media has had a stick up its ass about the alternative weekly universe since the Voice changed hands a year ago. Michaelangelo Matos is a critic who got his start in the alt-weekly world, collecting some of his first freelance paychecks from Village Voice Media newspapers and even working as music editor of the VVM-owned Seattle Weekly before he quit rather than have to actually speak to the new owners. After fleeing the Weekly, it didn't take long for Matos to tire of blogging snotty remarks about his successor at the paper. So he turned chickenshit into chicken salad by trying to run his own music poll on a three-month old sister blog of Gawker, a website which spent 2006 worrying whether Radar would ever publish another issue again while giving us updates on Tony Danza 's ordering habits at Balducci's.

The Village Voice, even after parting ways with long-time music critic and Pazz and Jop founder Robert Christgau, was still conducting its Pazz and Jop Poll. So who gives a shit about a three-month old blog doing a poll of its own?

No one, other than 55-year-old white guys who spend their nights snapping the rubberband of their ponytail while listening to Yo La Tengo reissues that get sent directly to their apartment (since they don't want that upstart calendar editor making 24k a year sorting through their mail back at the office).

Some of those critics, aided by carefully placed PR calls and some daily-newspaper-editor stroking, started the pile-on, attacking the Village Voice after parent company Village Voice Media decided it would rather have in its employ writers who actually went to shows and did some reporting on the artists they were writing about.

Until now, the Village Voice has not commented on any of these non-stories. But at some point, the bullshit gets so thick that you have to flush the toilet and clear the air.

Although many of the stories referred to Pazz and Jop as a venerable and cherished institution, most of these media outlets had little or nothing to say about the poll in year's past, usually not reporting on it at all. They were only interested in our cultural treasure when someone tried to piss on it and they could add their own stream-of-conscience to the golden shower. NPR—an entity living off the teat of government subsidies and Ray Kroc's widow's transfat-drenched death money—decided there was a national story in a guy with a website doing a music poll just like the Village Voice.

"Many of the country's most prominent critics, including Tom Moon of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Ann Powers of The Los Angeles Times and Jim Derogatis of The Chicago Sun-Times have told NPR that they won't be voting in the [Pazz and Jop] poll this year," said the story. Never mind the fact that two out of three of the critics they mentioned by name have collected paychecks from public radio, one of them an old acquaintance of Matos' from Seattle. Silly NPR, full disclosure is for kids. (NPR, which conducted a circle jerk of former Voice employees in a 2006 story, was good enough to tell the listener that Mr. Christgau is now a paid contributor of NPR.) The New York Times and the LA Times joined the whine parade as well—and if the mainstream media runs with a story, you know the conspiracy theorists at the San Francisco Bay Guardian will be right there to pick it up after a few months.

Gawker sent out its invitations to critics in November. How did they get people to contribute? With a small bribe. "As an added bonus," Matos wrote at the bottom of the ballot he sent to more than 1,200 critics, "once you've accepted the invitation, you'll be able to post comments on all Gawker Media blogs." Translation: the once-powerless music critic who accepted the invitation would now be able to call people "douches" under relative anonymity.

Matos kicked off his cover version of Pazz & Jop with a 5,000 word essay in which he mentioned himself more than 125 times. That's something he likes to do, as anyone who read his pamphlet on Prince's Sign O' the Times can attest to.

"I rooted for the Hold Steady on principle, though I do wish their most acclaimed album wasn't also their weakest," wrote Matos, who must have been really tired by the end of it all. Otherwise he would have never written a sentence that made him sound like such a tool (and would easily have earned "douche chill of the week" honors from Gawker, had they not been paying the guy who wrote it).

We're all dancing about architecture. At the end of the day, you don't want to read Matos' rail on about how so very hard it was to put his Gawker poll together, and how he couldn't have guessed how so many critics would have voted for Gnarl's Barkley's "Crazy" as song of the year" (regardless of the fact that "Crazy" was christened song of the year by every music critic back in June). You don't want to hear how some critics are boycotting this poll, or boycotting the other poll, or voting in both.

No.

You just want to know what the best music is to dance to/drink to/fuck to/live to.

That's what the music sections of Village Voice Media ultimately deliver.

Village Voice kills music criticism? Dewey Defeats Truman, Motherfuckers.

Yep. Gotta be a fake. Not even a hacksta's paradise like the Voice would run this crap.

Earlier: Jackin' Pop Survey 2006

That map to your right is an illustration of the reach enjoyed by mega-weekly chain New Times Village Voice Media; this week, the network's music editors have been releasing their end-of-year package across the nation. (So far, we've seen pieces of it pop up in Cleveland, Kansas City, Miami, Dallas, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Broward-Palm Beach.) Chunked up by genre before being dispersed across the country, the pieces, taken as a whole, don't reflect a critical stance as they do a singular sentiment: There was a lot of music that came out this year. Who knew, right?

THE GOOD: The real metal vs. hipster metal fight between the list of "hardest, heaviest metal albums" and the list of "heavy rockers that will also make you see stars of the hallucinogenic variety" is, at the very least, sort of entertaining. Time for a throwdown at the bro-down!
THE BAD: Breaking the lists down by genre probably seemed like a good idea when these pieces were assigned, but the end result is a slew of neutered recaps that read more like newsy rundowns than critical analyses. It's hard not to wonder what records each writer would have written up had stylistic restrictions not been placed upon their choices—perhaps it would have given the pieces a bit of personality. And hey, maybe this writer wouldn't have felt the need to laud the pile of sub-Paula Abdul dreck that Gwen Stefani squeezed out a few weeks ago.
THE WHAAAA? "Ultimately, as any Pitchdork blogger or college radio DJ worth his salt could tell you, indie rock is a shape-shifting term that encompasses any and/or all of those things. And many of my favorite releases this year offer a pretty good reflection of that sentiment." Seems like a bit of a long-winded way to say "Hey, I liked what I liked, and yes, that includes She Wants Revenge," no?

Music [New Times Broward-Palm Beach]

In the last three days, the comments on the post have blowing up, both pro and con: The Breihan bashers seem to have a long-simmering frustration over the fact that hip-hop writers for mainstream periodicals are often privileged white guys, and feel Breihan is arrogantly assuming that he has the right to interpret and criticize black culture; the Breihan boosters claim that while they have their own problems with his writing, the post plays the race card to cover up its weaker arguments.

Whew.

Anyway, Breihan hasn't yet responded on his Voice blog, Status Ain't Hood. And while this is normally the part of the show were we work in some tie-it-all-up-with-a-joke kicker, we know when we're out of our element, and it's hard to riff when people are comparing writers to trigger-happy NYPD officers. So instead we're just going to send it to the boards: Take a look at the post, the replies, and some of Breihan's work, and mull it over.

COMBAT JACK Runs A Check On TOM BREIHAN's 'Hood Status... [dallaspenn.com]
Status AIn't Hood [Village Voice]

This Is Constantine Maroulis. He Wishes You Knew That. [Village Voice]

There's no way to feel ambivalent about Xgau: Like him or not—and we've found ourselves on both sides of that argument—he's one of the best-known and respected music writers in the world, and the only one to ever earn a nickname (calling Dan Aquilante a "shithead walrus" doesn't count). And it's kind of hard to not at least admire a 64-year-old who goes to see the Hold Steady at the Bowery Ballroom, and looks as though he's having more fun than half the crowd. We wanted to send him off in the style of his oft-inscrutable decoder-ring-needy reviews, but even we can't pull that off. Instead, we'll tip our hat to the newly unemployed Christgau, and ask him: Ever been interested in doing some freelance music-blogging?

"The Dead Is Dead" [Gawker]