Talking ‘Exile’ on WFUV

The good people at WFUV asked me back to chat about the reissue of Exile on Main St. Listen here, subscribe here.

I’ll be back there next week to review the new Teenage Fanclub.

Yes, it’s officially official

That thing you might have heard about how the New York Times is going to start charging for online access?

• “It’s official. The New York Times says it will stop giving away its expensive-to-produce paper online and institute a metered model a la the Financial Times Web site.” (Columbia Journalism Review)


• “It’s official: the NYT is putting up an FT-style paywall.” (Felix Salmon)


• “It’s official: the New York Times is going to start charging for its website at the beginning of 2011.” (Gawker)


• “It’s Official: Your Online New York Times Will Come at a Price” (Blogging Stocks)


• “It’s Official: New York Times to Charge for Online Content” (The Wrap)


• “It’s Official: NYT To Start Charging For Content In 2011” (Mediaite)


• “It’s Official: New York Times Will Adopt Online Meter—But Not Until 2011” (Paid Content)


• “It’s official: The New York Times will implement a metered pay wall in 2011” (Media Bistro)


• “It’s Official – NY Times To Charge For Online Content” (Franklin Center)


• “The New York Times has made it official: It’s going to charge for access under certain conditions starting in 2011.” (CNET)


• “It started as a media industry murmur, but now it’s official: the New York Times, the most popular online newspaper in the U.S., will begin charging for access to its web site content.” (Lifehacker)

And in the other news of the day:

• “It’s Official, World: Vampire Weekend’s Contra Is America’s #1 Record” (Village Voice)


• “It’s official: Vampire Weekend have gone from indie rock sensations to the nation’s biggest musical act!” (Spin)


• “It’s official. XL score first US number one album on a UK indie in 19 years. Vampire Weekend top Billboard album chart with ‘Contra’ ”(XL)

More decade stuff: Return to WFUV

I’m not quite done with the decade yet. Still have to do postmortems on my 2007 and 2008 lists, and then of course finish up my 2009 list. I spent the holiday weekend unpacking, centering and leveling picture frames, and re-alphebetizing records, so I’m running behind. Soon, I swear.

But first. The good people at WFUV, where for two years I reviewed records every week, invited me back for a special end-o’-decade show. Claudia Marshall and I talked about a few of my shoulda-beens for the decade: amazing albums that did not get the attention they deserved at the time, and are getting even less now. Find out what I chose tomorrow morning at 8:30, on 90.7 FM in New York. They also podcast it here.

And now back to lists for me.

❧

UPDATE: Here’s the link for the audio.

Recap of ‘Mad Men’ recaps

Mad Men is awesome, no doubt. And deserving of every scrap of Internet fandom. But I’m overwhelmed and a bit puzzled by the flood of Monday-morning recaps. Why do we need so many? Do they really contribute much? (And is there any audience for a plot synopsis except for people who already know the plot?)

So as a service to you, Kind Reader, I offer a review of today’s Mad Men recaps, so you don’t have to read them all yourself. With the time you save, you can actually watch the show again.


1. ArtsBeat. After a suggestion I don’t quite follow — that Mad Men might be “slowly turning into The Sopranos” — comes a straightforward (if fancifully titled) breakdown of the major plotlines: the creatives getting high in the office (“Cheech & Chong”); Sally Draper’s thieving (“Davey and Goliath” ); and Roger and Jane Sterling’s party (“Untitled Woody Allen Fall Project”). Strangely, however, Dave Itzkoff “didn’t even have time to discuss the other awkward party of the week, at Joan Holloway’s apartment.” Nerd points for pinning down Peggy’s new secretary and raising, in the comments, the interesting possibility that “Connie,” the man Don met at the country club, might be Conrad Hilton, Paris’s great-grandfather. 531 words.

• Name for Dr. Greg Harris: None.

2. Television Without Pity. I’ve enjoyed this site’s snarky recaps of other shows, which often give characters Maureen Dowd-like pet names. This one, by a user named Couch Baron, plays it straight, yet drops the ball by omitting significant details, like the fact that Joan entertains her guests on an accordion. (The physical symbolism of her embracing this constrictive machine should count for something, as should the fact that she sings a cutesy French song in a girlish voice.) Also, the timeline is odd: Why begin the recap with Sally’s crime when the casting call for faux Ann-Margaret Ann-Margret came first? 544 words.

• Name for Dr. Greg Harris: Greg.

3. Gawker. Cool Web functionality: In addition to the long text synopses, there are five embedded videos of key scenelets. Also, a smart move by Brian Moylan to break down the episode by theme (racism, fashion, social interactions, drugs) rather than by discrete plotline. As with many of these summaries, though, I thought it was a little heavy on pseudo-critical one-liners (“If anything, Mad Men shows us that the idyllic lifestyle is merely a mirage, and intruders and interlopers lurk behind every highball”) and light on actual plot. No recap I’ve read, for example, even mentioned what idea Peggy and the pot boys came up with for their Bacardi campaign. Why? 1,236 words.

• Egregious errors: One of these two spellings of Peggy Olson is wrong: “Let’s just hope that ‘My name is Peggy Olsen and I want to smoke marijuana’ isn’t the precursor to ‘My name is Peggy Olson, and I’m a drug addict.’ ” Also, if you post videos it’s doubly important to get the quotes right.
• Name for Dr. Greg Harris: Doctor Rapist.

4. New York magazine. A long, chewy one by Emily Nussbaum. Plot summary looks pretty thorough, although if I didn’t happen to enjoy Nussbaum’s arch, zinger-licious style I think it would be tough to digest the whole thing. When her lines work, they’re great: “The only thing worse than marrying your rapist is marrying your loser rapist.” But when they don’t, they simply don’t compute: “Peggy seems to believe she is living in the future, one in which women won’t have to tiptoe, or be slotted as a Betty, a Joan, or a Peggy 1.0. (Although they might be a Samantha, a Miranda, a Carrie, or a Charlotte.)” Huh? Also, weird and unnecessary organizational scheme (“The Pitch,” “The Campaign,” “Early Results”). 1,151 words.

• Name for Dr. Greg Harris: Dr. Greg Rape.

5. Entertainment Weekly. Even longer, but not nearly as chewy. Karen Valby is finely tuned to the female characters, commenting sympathetically on Joan’s humiliations, Sally’s need for attention, and Betty’s twitchiness. Not quite as insightful about the men, and while this recap as a whole is reasonably thorough, the writing gets a bit overripe. (“It was an evening of warring impulses, people either grasping at outdated traditions or finding freedom in experimentation.”) Worst of all, though, are the conspicuous editing lapses, inexplicable for a Time Warner publication. 1,679 words.

• Egregious errors: “Black face,” “sayanora,” “to the manor born.”
• Name for Dr. Greg Harris: Greg.

6. TV Guide. A whopper. Light on analysis, but after reading so many style-over-substance armchair critiques I’m glad to find a synopsis that really is a synopsis, even if it is nearly as long as the script itself. Which raises one point: The writer, Adam Bryant, posted this at 11:18 p.m. on Sunday, and this is way too long and too polished to have been written in 18 minutes — clearly it was done ahead of time with a screener, and published after the show ended to look like a blog post, or at least to avoid spoilage. Fair? Not sure, but clearly Dave Itzkoff had about 16 other deadlines to deal with while he was recapping. 1,813 words.

• Name for Dr. Greg Harris: Greg.

7. Starpulse. A creative one: This was written in Peggy’s voice, as she revels in her newfound feeling of liberation and surveys the weirdness around her. (“If I wasn’t in the office I would have been stuck at Roger Sterling’s Derby Day party. I had no idea minstrel shows were still acceptable; I thought this was 1963.”) Insufficient as a plot summary, of course, but an entertaining read, and also a glimpse into the way the characters are being read by viewers. Last week the writer here, Mike Ryan, did his recap in the voice of Paul Kinsey, who in that episode was ridiculed as a “Communist” and, in Ryan’s summary, seethed with resentment and superiority. (This week his insult was even worse: “educated.”) 544 words.

• Name for Dr. Greg Harris: Greg.

Big scalpin’

My story about strange new world of ticket scalping is in the paper today.

It’s a complicated issue, and everybody has been covering it in recent months, including me. My story attempts to explore the phenomenon of the “secondary ticket market” from the point of view of the scalpers themselves, whom you don’t usually hear much about. Decide for yourself about their ingenuity and legitimacy in business.

Hope you enjoy it.

WFUV update

I spoke too soon when I announced that last week would be my final broadcast with the WFUV Music Review, where I’ve been reviewing records every Tuesday morning for two years. (Archived links below right.)

They asked me to stay on for a couple more weeks, and I can’t say no to people who have been so good to me, so now my final show will actually be next week. Tomorrow I’ll be reviewing Deer Tick’s Born on Flag Day, and next Tuesday I bow out with Wye Oak’s The Knot. And then that’ll be it. Really.

Farewell to WFUV

I’m very sorry to report that after two years and 101 episodes, I am leaving the WFUV Music Review. It’s been an honor, and my host Claudia Marshall and producer Alisa Ali have made it a lot of fun, too. I wish I could stay on, but the weekly schedule has become impossible for me to keep up, so I have to let it go. I’m bummed.

My final review is of Regina Spektor’s Far, which was broadcast this morning and is also available as a podcast. Archived links for all of the shows I’ve done on WFUV are below and to the right on this page, and you can subscribe to the podcast here.

Oh, forgot to mention

Tweeting Coachella here.

Blender pops

I’m very saddened to learn that Blender magazine is ceasing publication, effective immediately, according to the very reliable Nat Ives at Ad Age.

The music magazine ranks have been thinned in the past year or so, but this is a major blow. They did great work, kept the other mags on their toes, and in the five or six years I’ve been contributing I wrote a lot of pieces I’m proud of, thanks to ace editors Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks.

Paid subscriptions at the end of last year were 768,000, down 8 percent from the year before, according to Ad Age, while newsstand sell-through, the number that the bean-counters pay most attention to, was down 18 percent, at 44,000.

RIP. And, ahem, let’s hope that Alpha Media Group makes good on those freelance debts.

SXSW blog, tweets, and actual articles

For all the South by Southwest news you could ever want, and more, I direct you to the extensive, mutli-platform coverage by myself and my colleagues at the Times.

We’ll be blogging at ArtsBeat, and I’ll be popping my Twitter cherry there too, to get you all those 140-character bons mots that just can’t wait for a full blog item. (Or full copy-editing.)

And, as a special bonus, we will also be writing actual articles for the paper — we’re talking thousands of characters here, allowing for things like quotes, ideas and narrative. You’ve already read some by David Carr and Jenna Wortham (right?), and over the next several days you’ll get more by me and Jon Pareles.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Rolling Stone interns, old at heart

The most interesting year-end list I’ve seen is by Rolling Stone’s interns, posted yesterday:

Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
The Black Keys - Attack & Release
Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
Beck - Modern Guilt
Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band - Conor Oberst
My Morning Jacket - Evil Urges
MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
The Hold Steady - Stay Positive
Portishead - Third

Besides the obligatory Fleet Foxes, these are suspiciously baby-boomer choices for a bunch of 20-year-olds. Does anyone under 40 really care about the Black Keys’ humorless retro blooze? And Beck? Coldplay? My Morning Jacket? Portishead? Fine albums, and MMJ will probably place high on my list. But I’m 34.

Are the interns really this fuddy duddy, or are they just brown-nosing their bosses with RS sacred cows like Beck? (Who has gotten at least four stars for everything since Mellow Gold, which of course got three and a half.) If the latter, they’ve gone too far: Even those masthead elders are hip enough to recognize TV on the Radio, Lil Wayne, Girl Talk, Blitzen Trapper and Santogold.

My Best Got ’08

From GQ:

Click here for the indispensable Edirol R-09, and here for that interview with the guy from the New York Times.

Jim James, music critic

Rolling Stone has put up a bunch of ballots from their not very persuasive recent list of the “greatest singers of all time.” They're fun to look through. Hetfield’s feels right, with Ronnie James Dio as his fave and high marks for Lemmy Kilmeister and Sean Harris of Diamondhead; Beatles-worshipper Ozzy Osborne puts John at No. 1 and Paul at No. 2.

But the best I see is from Jim James of My Morning Jacket, who seems to have actually taken seriously the task of ranking history’s greatest singers. He puts “Marvin Pentz Gaye Jr.” in the top slot and includes Jimmie Rodgers, Louis Armstrong, Bon Scott, Wayne Coyne, Nina Simone and Gram Parsons. That’s a fine, honest, learned list, and it’s what I wish the final product was more like.

Interesting thing: a bunch of people on these ballots chose Bon Scott, who didn't make it to the Top 100. Wonder where he placed?

40 singers inexplicably omitted from Rolling Stone’s 100 ‘greatest of all time’

Rolling Stone has just published their list of the “100 greatest singers of all time,” but like most of the magazine’s rankings, it basically covers 1955 to 1975, with some token others. You have to go to No. 30 (Prince) before you hit a singer whose career began after the Nixon administration, and No. 45 (Kurt Cobain) No. 39 (Jeff Buckley) for somebody post-Reagan. Rolling Stone gives every birthdate, and if I had time I would calculate the average age. Anyone?

But the omissions truly surprised me. Even restricting this “all time” list to the 20th century (surely Farinelli, the great castrato celebrity of the 1700s — he once blew Handel off — was better than No. 99, right?), and to non-classical singers (Maria Callas vs. No. 69), the choices are bizarre. Here, off the top of my head, are 40 highly notable omissions; these are always judgment calls, of course, but I’d argue that at least the top 10 are absolute essentials.

1. Frank Sinatra
2. Nat King Cole
3. Billie Holiday
4. Ella Fitzgerald
5. Bing Crosby
6. Mahalia Jackson
7. Leadbelly
8. Bessie Smith
9. Miriam Makeba
10. João Gilberto
11. Dionne Warwick
12. Sandy Denny
13. Natalie Merchant
14. Linda Thompson
15. Blind Willie Johnson
16. Marion Williams
17. Nancy Wilson (jazz)
18. Harry Belafonte
19. Jimmie Rogers
20. Carly Simon
21. Joan Baez
22. Barry Gibb
23. Caetano Veloso
24. Cab Calloway
25. Blind Lemon Jefferson
26. Ron Isley
27. Salif Keita
28. Sade
29. Louis Armstrong
30. Ian Curtis
31. Sarah Vaughan
32. Asha Bhosle
33. Louis Jordan
34. Serge Gainsbourg
35. Amália Rodrigues
36. Robert Johnson
37. Woody Guthrie
38. Youssou N’Dour
39. Bobby McFerrin
40. Baaba Maal

And that’s without Latin music (Hector Lavoe? Vicente Fernandez?) or almost anything Asian, which are not my specialties. Just for good measure, here are 10 more that I wouldn’t call essentials, but one could argue have major significance:

1. Marianne Faithfull
2. Carmen Miranda
3. Gilberto Gil
4. Beth Orton
5. Pete Seeger
6. Sting
7. Daryl Hall
8. Arthur Lee
9. Barry White
10. Madonna

Favorite CMJ blog comment so far

Clicca here.

Listed

Recently I was invited by the good people at Dusted magazine to contribute to their “Listed” feature, which is an annotated playlist. They asked me to dig deep in my collection for 10 records that “mean something special” to me; I went for maximum crate-dug sentimentality and chose some favorite 7-inches of the 1990s.

“Listed” runs weekly as a pair of columns by two guests, and I’m honored that my contribution appears alongside the always interesting Shearwater.

Bragging rights: ‘Best Music Writing 2008’

I’m thrilled to report that an article of mine will be included in the 2008 edition of Da Capo’s Best Music Writing anthology, which will be out in September. Nelson George was the guest editor, and he chose my profile of Stargate, the Norwegian production duo behind hits by Beyoncé, Rihanna and others.

I’m in very good company. Here’s the full table of contents:

• CARL WILSON * The Trouble With Indie Rock: It’s Not Just Race, It’s Class * Slate
• BILL WASIK * Annuals * Oxford American
• CLIVE THOMPSON * Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog * The New York Times
• JEFF WEISS * Soulja Boy: Cranking the Chain * LA Weekly
• DANYEL SMITH * Keyshia Cole: Hell’s Angel * Vibe
• NOAH BERLATSKY * Underrated Overground * Chicago Reader
• SOLVEJ SCHOU * First Person: Auditioning for this Season’s ‘American Idol’ * Associated Press
• BEN SISARIO * Wizards in the Studio, Anonymous on the Street * The New York Times
• BRANDON PERKINS * Wu-Tang: Widdling Down Infinity: Can a Bunch of old, dirty bastards save hip-hop for a third time or will the math just collapse upon itself? * URB
• JONATHAN CUNNINGHAM * Freaks Come Out at Night: Grandmaster Dee Cuts a Wide Swath on the Comeback Trail * Broward-Palm Beach New Times
• NADIA PFLAUM * Pay 2 Play: Hip-hop Hustlers are making Off with Kansas City Rappers’ Hard-Earned Cash * The Kansas City Pitch
• ANN POWERS * It’s Time to Kick this Addiction * Los Angeles Times
• NIKE D’ANDREA * Bad Habits: NunZilla’s Punk-rock Catechism Will Leave you Praying for More * Phoenix New Times
• J. BENNETT * Dimmu Borgir * Decibel Magazine
• ERIC PAPE * “We Sing Everything. We have Nothing Else” * Spin
• ANDY TENNILLE * Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings * Harp
• MARKE B * Gayest. Music. Ever.: The Death of Circuit, Energy 92.7, and the New Queer Dance Floor Diaspora * San Francisco Bay Guardian
• PHIL SUTCLIFFE * Pete Seeger * MOJO
• JEFF SHARLET * The People’s Singer: the Embattled Lee Hays * Oxford American
• LARRY BLUMENFELD * Band on the Run in New Orleans * Salon
• DAVID KAMP * Sly Stone’s Higher Power * Vanity Fair
• MATT ROGERS * Beast from the East: Mandrill’s Musical brew is Equal Parts Brooklyn and Motherland * Wax Poetics
• OLIVER WANG * Boogaloo Nights * The Nation
• SAM KASHNER * Fever Pitch: When Travolta Did Disco; the Making of Saturday Night Fever * Movies Rock
• SEAN NELSON * Dead Man Talking: “Kurt Cobain: About a Son” * The Stranger
• JODY ROSEN * A Pirate Looks at Sixty: Jimmy Buffett’s Mid-Life Crises * Slate
• ALAN LIGHT * The Notorious BIG * Blender
• ALEX ROSS * Apparition in the Woods * The New Yorker
• GARY GIDDINS * Back to Bossa: Rosa Passos and Fifty Years of Bossa Nova. * The New Yorker
• DAVID MARGOLICK * The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise * The New York Times
• CRAVEN ROCK * On Lynyrd Skynyrd and the White Trash Thing * Around the Bend * Ten Years * Eaves of Ass #6
• TOM EWING * The History Book on the Shelf: ABBA * Pitchfork Media

The series has been coming out annually since 2000, and always includes as an appendix a list of “other notable essays” that are often just as good. This year Idolator has put together a handy four-part index of links to those articles.

Bragging rights

Thank you, Brooklyn Vegan, for referring to two of my recent stories in four consecutive blog items.

BV also has information about the Bell House, a significant new venue under construction in Brooklyn, which was unfortunately omitted from my piece on Thursday.

Murdoch = Bobby Brown?

Apparently Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal is complete. The paper is now quoting Bobby Brown in photo captions to blog items about the psychology of Wall Street:

Is it significant that the first comment was posted by someone named “LOL”?

From the archives: Simon Doonan gets ‘nasty’ on me

Suddenly remembered: The time Simon Doonan wrote an angry column in the New York Observer about my negative review of his book Nasty. In a roundup in the Times Book Review three years ago, I called his book “a memoir of style consciousness and gay life never quite as witty as it pretends to be,” and said that “to hear Doonan tell his story, it’s a wonder not everyone raised in mid-century Reading, England, turned out to be as foppish and superficial as he did.”

Doonan flipped out, lamely playing the homophobia card. “Is ‘foppish and superficial’ some fab new Old Gray Lady code for ‘gay’?” he said of this “daringly un-P.C. stroke of [my] pen.” (The definition of “fop” notwithstanding, his accusation is ridiculous; his sexual orientation has nothing to do with his being a mediocre writer.)

“Instead of reviewing my book or my writing,” Doonan said in the column, “the reviewer, one Ben Sisario, chose to focus on me and what he saw as my underexamined self-image.” Though parts of Nasty are very amusing, it became painful to see that he believes so strongly that he must cover up what he believes is his essential ugliness: “It is your duty not to inflict your innate troll-like appearance upon the people around you and to do everything in your power to camouflage it,” he wrote. This idea is repeatedly called “life-enhancing.” But I found it sad and self-loathing.

I got more enjoyment from his loathing of me — the best thing anyone has said to me, ever, is “fop off!”