What the blogs were posting, uh, a year ago: Meat Puppets drummer Derrick Bostrom has been running his
Bostworld blog for a few years now, each post rummaging around in Bostrom's attic-cluttered noggin and pulling out one of his idiosyncratic obsessions: yellowing '50s newspaper articles about Ike (Eisenhower, not Turner), frayed restaurant menus from the bygone era of three-martini lunches, hit parade entries perhaps forgotten even by the folks who made them. It's a helluva lot more interesting than "Arcade Fire Watch Hour 679: Win clips his toenails." Mountain Goats frontman/
Last Plane to Jakarta overlord John Darnielle recently introduced us to
part seven in Bostrom's "Reports from the Country" series of nuggets from (mostly) pre-countrypolitan Nashville. Its 14 songs present a heartwarming vision of base human cruelty and American society on the verge of collapse set to sweet pedal steel and down-home harmonies. Particularly inexplicable is Dottie West's "Mommy, Can I Still Call Him Daddy?" which has to be one of the oddest and most brutally honest (or just plain brutal) songs about divorce in history, finally answering the question, "Does this mean daddy doesn't love me anymore?" The collection is still available to download, and everyone who doesn't mind having catchy ditties about child abuse and child abandonment stuck in their head all day should check it out. All together now! "Slap her down again, paw, slap her down again..."
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Idolator
And I don't just mean your mental state (although that certainly gets its knocks)! The Guardian today looks at the long, glorious history of musicians and fans giving back to those people who dare criticize the music they love. And by "giving back," I mean "physically attacking, sometimes with knives." I can't tell if these stories are making me feel better because the only retributions I've received are mean e-mails or if they make me feel worse for not saying things that get people really riled. But my colleague has apparently not had the same problem as me! After the jump, I talk to Idolator's own Jess Harvell about his top three biggest threatdowns.
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