Tag Archives: music

Friday Five(ish) on Saturday…Music blogs

I decided to round up the links to some of the music blogs I’ve been checking out lately because, well, you keep asking me to and I keep promising I’ll get to it. So here you go, in no particular order:

Pitchfork isn’t really a blog but I’m going to put it at the top of the list because it’s useful. And even when not useful, it’s silly and amusing (although not intentionally so). Pitchfork is frequently accused of being over-wrought, pretentious and opaque (often by me). Isn’t that what rock journalism is all about? Quit your whining.

Brooklyn Vegan, of course, because you’re not cool unless you read Brooklyn Vegan.

Music snobbery is also a good read, although I have the same problem with Music Snobbery that I have with Brooklyn Vegan – I’m unfamiliar with a lot of the venues they mention, but that’s okay.

The Music Slut is constantly posting videos I’d otherwise miss out on, seeing as I no long spend my days in an office and lack coworkers dropping by and asking, “Hey, have you seen…”

Gorilla vs Bear had me with their name and graphics, but I enjoy the content as well. Like Brooklyn Vegan, Gorilla vs Bear produces a blog radio show for Sirius XM radio. (For now).

Stereo cupcake
is where I learn important tidbits such as: Santogold changed her name to Santigold. Every bit as silly as it sounds, but I bet it’s been publicity gold. Case in point: this is the first time I’ve ever mentioned Santigold on my site, ever. Also probably the last, but that’s not the point.

Sasha Frere Jones is, of course, a professional music critic/journalist and musician. He gets double bonus points for this great post, “Who is on Twitter?”

  • people who are just back from a really awesome run
  • people who are involved with “computers”
  • DJs
  • DJs at the airport
  • DJs who are drunk
  • people who don’t have anyone’s email address
  • people who are mad at television
  • people who have forgotten how to email
  • people who have forgotten how to text
  • people who are involved in “social networking” and optimizing the power of re-Tweeting and “computers”
  • people who can’t find a reasonable picture of themselves
  • people who really like the news
  • DJs at the airport
  • people who are hungry
  • rappers
  • people who are cold
  • people who are back from an OK run
  • people who can’t figure out what to feed their kids
  • Shaquille O’Neal
  • people who have never seen snow
  • Rachel Maddow
  • forty-five people I’ve never heard of who all invented the internet
  • people who are concerned about the collapse of the publishing industry
  • people who like Battlestar Galactica
  • rappers who are eating food
  • DJs
  • people who are about to go for a run
  • DJs who want to know where you are
  • people who are mad at Twitter
  • people who are mad at rappers
  • a nun
  • DJs

His New Yorker music blog is where the in-depth music writing is, but I just wanted an excuse to link to that twitter post.

Sovietpanda is a Minneapolis music blogger and DJ who came to my attention recently after a friend forwarded me one of his tweets:

“Faces do not melt because of your shitty DJ set. Faces melt because the Ark of the Covenant is opened.”

True ’nuff.

Friday 20

So many important things to post about today – the American Heart Association’s vitally important Go Red for Women campaign, the idiocy of Metro’s proposed cost-cutting measures, the malfeasance involved in the peanut butter/salmonella scandal that, among other things, included sending 32 truckloads of of contaminated peanut products to the free lunch program in our nation’s schools, the Michael Phelps saga, the roundup of blog-links I really liked this week, the squirrel that fell from the sky while I was standing on the sidewalk talking to my neighbor, or even how much I hated the underwear I was wearing earlier.

Instead, I’m going to explain to you what would happen to Husband if he was exposed to my ipod. Did you see that episode of Fringe where people’s brains were being liquified by a mysterious electro-magnetic force? That’s what would happen.

To demonstrate my terrible taste in music, here’s the playlist I threw together for an hour-long run today. The only criteria I used when scrolling through about 50 gigs of music was, “must be able to run to it for an hour.” Somehow what I ended up with was, “19 songs performed by women, plus 1 by the Chemical Brothers.” I don’t know what that means, beyond “Husband’s brain would liquify if he was forced to listen to this in it’s entirety,” but there ya go.

Rehab – Amy Winehouse
House Of Bamboo – Southern Culture On The Skids
Galvanize (feat Q-Tip) – The Chemical Brothers
Human Behaviour – Björk
Stupid Girls – pink
Girlfriend – Avril Lavigne
Hazy Shade of Winter – Bangles
I Hate Myself for Loving You – Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
SOS – Rihanna
Circus – Britney Spears
U + Ur Hand – pink
Disturbia – Rihanna
Genie in a Bottle – Christina Aguilera
Bad Word For A Good Thing – The Friggs (myspace)
Just A Girl – No Doubt
Things That Scare Me – Neko Case
Army of Me – Björk
Call Me When You’re Sober – Evanescence
Under the Gun – Supreme Beings of Leisure (myspace)
Girlfriend – Alicia Keys

I tried to publish the playlist to itunes but itunes didn’t seem to like the amalgamation of amazon, emusic and files ripped from CDs so we’ll see how that works out…I’ll post a link if it works out at all.

Grateful Dead

Several readers asked what I have against the Grateful Dead.

Let me explain. It’s not really so much that I don’t want to hear them, it’s that I simply don’t. My brain just blocks the music automatically. You see, long long ago I lived in a group house – a house collectively leased by a group of college students. (This was a cheap off-campus arrangement, not a condition of parole or anything of the like. I clarify that simply because the term “group house” has different connotations in different places).

I had 5-6 roommates at any given time. Most of them were Deadheads. Most of them liked to listen to the Dead. All the time. I worked nights sometimes and would often get up in the early afternoon to find everyone had gone to work or school, but they’d all left their cassette players on in their rooms. What’s a cassette player? Ask your parents.

This means that while I was sleeping, my brain was being accosted by not one or two, but up to five different Dead shows. Simultaneously. To this day, even if I consciously listen to the Dead, the songs don’t sound right unless you’re mashing 3 or 4 of them together. If you’d like to replicate this experience, go to the Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive for the Grateful Dead. Borrow 4 or 5 laptops if you need, and play a different show in every room of your house. Turn them all up loud. Better still, also choose the low-fi stream option. Now, go to bed. Report back to me in the morning. Then, do this for about 8 more months.

That’s the short-form of the story. When I originally posted about this I remember linking to Mark Weingarten’s piece in Slate, “A Long, Staid Trip-How Deadheads ruined the Grateful Dead,” but I’ll be damned if I can remember how I got from point A to point B. It’s an interesting opinion piece, so I’m going to link it again, just for the hell of it.