Lizzyville

Link Love | Rihanna Interview Teaser Part Two, Blur Drummer Going Into Politics, Sleigh Bells Interview, Kings of Leon's Love Songs, Norah Indieana Jones & More

Link Love | Rihanna's Honesty, Owl Service v. Postal City, Jim O'Rourke Interview, the Bono Wall & More

Jim O'Rourke

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Owl City has to talk about the Postal Service for at least three questions. Cue joke about Harry Potter's Owl Post.

Link Love | Gaga's Favorite Music Is Her ... Fans, Is Chris Owens for Real?, Baditude, Some Songs Considered & More

Let this be the last time you have to look at this image.

Link Love | Village Voice's Sassy Guide to CMJ Panels, Animal Collective Model for PETA, Pandora's Humanity, Flavorpill CMJ Guide & Will Fleet Foxes Ever Be America Big?

The Guardian expounds upon its own theory that Fleet Foxes "will never be as big as America." I really thought they were talking about the country sometimes referred to by the second word in the name of the continent on which it is located. But no, the band.

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Rob Harvilla's "Unnecessarily Sassy User's Guide to Tuesday's Slate of CMJ Panels." A list of the actual panels with brief editorial attached. Example: "Hey Man! I Know My Rights! The Future of Intellectual Property. You have none/there isn't any."

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Animal Collective support PETA by, among other things, modeling the above adorable Save the Seals t-shirt. And here's something enjoyable to go with this something adorable. [via @gorillavsbear]

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Rob Horning delves into the New York Times piece on Pandora's alleged taste-prediction technology in his PopMatters blog Marginal Utility. (WARNING: article contains Žižek reference.)

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Sometimes, in life, people are going to try to tell you what to do. Sometimes, you should just take their goddamn advice, even if they tell you to do two things that are happening at exactly the same time in two distinct boroughs.

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A new and very poignant and gross and seasonal installment of "Letters to the Editors of Women's Magazines."

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Think About Life's new album, Family, is un-get-over-able. Stream it on Lala or visit the band's early, early performance at MHoW tonight at 7 pm. I will be there, trying to photograph rapidly moving objects in low light conditions.

Link Love | Shakira Applauds Music Piracy, Trent Reznor Marries His West Indian Girl, Ringtones Are Not Performances, Penn Badgley Buys Music, Male Music Writers Can Be Funny

Shakira told the UK's Sky News that she thinks illegal downloading has "brought me closer to my fans." Norah Jones and Nelly Furtado joined Shakira in this sentiment. "I like what's going on because I feel closer to the fans and the people who appreciate the music," Shakira said. "It's the democratisation of music in a way, and music is a gift. That's what it should be, a gift."

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Trent Reznor quietly married former West Indian Girls singer Mariqueen Maandig over the weekend, according to tweets from bandmate Danny Lohner. 

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Ringtones are not performances, according to a federal court, except if you assign a certain ringtone to a certain hot girl and she calls you and people are there to hear it.

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Bono continues to opine on faintly political things he knows nothing about, to the delight/disgust of 400-odd New York Times reader-commenters.

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Penn Badgley recently purchased (!!!!!!!!!!) music at Other Music during a "Night Out With" experience with the New York Times. His selections included some RZA and Toumani Diabata. Something tells me Fake Boobies will draw a blank on at least one of those picks.

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A hilarious review of a Secret Machines show in Phoenix. "I stood in blissful repose, hundering [sic] madness all around, forgetting I was in a half-empty warehouse surrounded by Kia salesmen, drinking lukewarm Budweiser, with a giant robot looming over my shoulder..."

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In a Vice magazine account, Jeff Fox discusses accidentally making a popular zine about Evan Dando (pictured above).

Link Love | Oprah Interviews Jay-Z, CMJ Survival Kit, Goodbye to Gourmet, Early Joan Baez Footage Found in a Freezer & More

Salon published a eulogy to Gourmet yesterday that's quite lovely. If it makes you feel sad and helpless, subscribe to Bon Appétit, which is also a Condé Nast title and is quite impressive, if its Thanksgiving '09 issue is any indication. I just did. It's only $12 a year. Says Salon's Alex Van Buren of Gourmet,

"[Editor-in-chief] Ruth Reichl was not a snob, but -- at her best -- an egalitarian badass. She is a lover of food in all its sensuous, unruly glory. She put haute French chefs like Daniel Boulud in line for a food cart on the street. She ran features about politics and poverty -- the life of a tomato laborer, a brilliant Chinese cook serving $7 entrées in Toronto, the travails of a restaurant parking valet. She asked novelist Junot Diaz to wax poetic about the authentic Dominican food of Northern Manhattan, and the result was so fantastic it sent readers from all corners of Gotham scurrying onto the 2/3 train to eat crunchy arroz con gandules (rice and pigeon peas)."

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Oprah interviews Jay-Z in the October issue of O Magazine. It's a pretty incredible glimpse into the, well, spiritual side of the artist. In the print edition he provides a list of his favorite books (including Seth Godin's Purple Cow, nice) and at the end of the interview (page 10 in Web terms), Jay-Z explains his work ethic (culled a little from his favorite books, I think). It's simple but searingly memorable:

"There’s the gift, there’s the spirit, and there’s the work—all three have to come together. If one of those things is off, it can stop you from becoming who you were meant to be.”

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The New Yorker's Alex Ross, the music critic and author of The Rest Is Noise, has started a blog at the New Yorker website. It's called Unquiet Thoughts.

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Speaking of the New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones sat down with Karin Dreijer Andersson at Webster Hall a couple of weeks ago ahead of her madly tweeted two-night light show. Weird venue, weirder music, wonderful interview.

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Early Joan Baez performance footage found ... in a freezer.

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New events site SuperGlued is making it a whole lot easier for badgeholders to survive CMJ without crying, missing opportunities, or going it alone (Twitter doesn't count as a plus-one). SuperGlued is far more than just a CMJ survival kit. It catalogs shows past and future, has artist profile pages, and lets you link up Flickr, Facebook and Twitter so that you, friends and stranger-fans can remember the shows you've been to.

Link Love | Rdio, Selling the Web to Kids, New Modeselektor Video, In Defense of Hype, Sorta

The L Magazine's Mike Conklin does an analysis of modern indie music hype (you know, the kind that turns a Black Kids review into a one-word apology followed by an emoticon - "It was disrespectful and childish," Conklin says of that incident, "but it also captured exactly how a lot of us felt about what had happened to our profession and about how we were treating young bands.")

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Rdio is a new music subscription service examined by the Times in "Still Trying to Sell Music by the Month." It's a collaboration between the guys from KaZaA, Skype and Joost, which the Times fails to immediately point out. (So supplement that article with this Guardian one.)

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A study by YouthNet shows that online businesses are failing to connect with kids adequately. So Twitter isn't the only one. One idea is to let kids and teens take more control over content. Fourth Story Media is an example of where this works. Penguin's Spinebreakers, says Charlotte McEleny in the New Media Age, is another. (Via @tomewing.)

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Pitchfork debuts Modeselektor's new video, "Art & Cash," in which famous artworks meld into goofy, Modeselektor-curated art installations and scary masks and Biblical references abound.

Link Love | Miley Quits Twitter and Hopefully Rapping, Kanye Does 'Eat, Pray, Love,' James Murphy Slams the Internet via the Internet & More

Miley has quit Twitter via a YouTube video in which she raps over a beat that sounds distinctly like "Idioteque," "minus the synthesizers," notes The Rawking Refuses to Stop (via Twitter). "Remix?" (The beat can actually be found on Garage Band, along with that little synth loop that comes in intermittently). Are you ever going to impress us, Miley (except for that time four years ago when I watched your show and found you quite a charismatic little tyke?)

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Speaking of which, James Murphy aka LCD Soundsystem has published a beautiful rant about the Internet on his MySpace blog. (Via Pitchfork.) 

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Jay-Z says that George Michael was at one point his idol. George was "really strong in the neighbourhood, he penetrated urban culture really strong," Jay-Z told NME in an interview. "I don't know if it was just the tracks or the melodies." 

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Kanye West is conducting his very own "Eat, Pray, Love," according to some British tabloids and NME.

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Passion Pit was recently victimized by David Letterman. Kinda.

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Ahead of a BBC 4 doc on synthesizers, The Guardian's Simon Reynolds writes: "'Electro' in the early-90s meant cutting-edge, the future-now; nowadays "electro" refers to the kind of sounds that lit up hipster bars in east London through this past decade and then went mainstream this year with La Roux and Lady Gaga, which is to say synthetic pop that doesn't use the full capacity of the latest digital technology, and is therefore almost as quaint as if it were made using a harpsichord."

Link Love | Radiohead Shall Record Again, The Marriage of the Critical and the Digital, Matthew Good Mad About Vancouver 2010, Pinkety Pink Pink, NoEcards, Hipsters Become Area of Intellectual Study, A Justice Video

 

Pareles actually makes me wish I had gone to the Pink show last night. But um I kind of hate MSG.

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Matthew Good released his new album Vancouver yesterday. He is taking the opportunity to talk about why the Vancouver Olympics this winter are going to ruin everything. And I love him.

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THIS ONE NEEDS TO BE IN ALL CAPS. Radiohead will head back into the studio this winter to record another album that will likely be released in 2010, says Ed O'Brien in NME, according to At Ease.

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Wired's Epicenter discusses the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit in D.C. and particularly, yesterday's discussion of the future of music journalism. What comes out here (it is Wired) is that the writing "should live on the same devices where we listen to our music — be that a computer, cellphone, MP3 player, tablet or home entertainment center." I'd love a Pitchfork app where I could just scroll through reviews by grade. I'm serious.

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Apple has rejected SomeEcards' application to the App Store because Some(of the)Ecards inflict cruel and unusual verbal punishment on proposed health care bills.

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Another big old piece of writing about hipsters. I like this one.

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Justice remixed Lenny Kravitz's "Let Love Rule" a few months ago. Now there is a video featuring quite original integration of film credits that nonetheless evokes the should-I-really-stay-and-watch-all-these feeling you get in the theater. It's directed by Keith Schofield (CSS's "Move," Death Cab's "Jealousy," loads of commercials).

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Nonsense sharpens the intellect. Does that include Gossip Girl?

Link Love | How Paper Magazine Has Survived 25 Years, Tribute to a Brooklyn Arts Maestro, Are There Startups in NYC?

In the first of a series of blog posts, Elie Seidman, a veteran startupper who just started Oyster Hotel Reviews, gives some background on her career and lists a series of provocative questions and statements about startups for future posts, including, "Choose your market carefully" and "Are you building an asset or a company or both?" (Thanks to friend, co-worker and travel writer Sarah Amandolare for tweeting!)

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Forbes does a nice analysis of how Paper Magazine has survived in the magazine industry for 25 years. (Thanks F.A.Y.)

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Zach Baron of the Village Voice pays touching tribute to Suzanne Fiol, who founded the Brooklyn (once itinerant but no longer itinerant) event space/series Issue Project Room and just passed away after a battle with cancer. Issue Project Room just secured more than $1 million in funding for its new venue at 110 Livingston Street from the Brooklyn borough president. 

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Breakups! It's a sad day for Jay. Or is it? Not sad for the band, that's for sure.

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The Financial Times on smoking employees. Sure, they may eventually pass on due to complications from their grimy pastime, but my, they're a nice lot (via PopMatters).

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Attend the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit in D.C. remotely.

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Spinner counts down "Rock's Biggest Quitters: 20 Musicians Who Walked Away From Fame" (from September but I just noticed it today).

Link Love | Lindsay Lohan as 'Artistic Adviser,' The Art of Sampling, Letters to the Editors of Women's Magazines Part 2, Regretsy, Is Thom Yorke Any Good?

This is a new series I'm doing. Starting Thursday, I'll officially be a full-time freelance writer, so you can expect it to be daily. Let's put this blog to work.

So I guess I was too distracted last week by this whole thing to read this whole thing: Edith Zimmerman, a fellow Wesleyan Class of '05 creative writer who writes like Miranda July with a splash of aftershave, a shot of whiskey and some instrumental Bacharach playing in the background, is doing what I hope is a monthly column called "Letters to the Editors of Women's Magazines" for The Awl. Edith used to have a very excellent blog at The L Magazine. Now, she haunts bars for Metromix. She also makes food come alive.

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This website brings tears to my eyes. It's called Regretsy and it's the stupid shit one heroic blogger finds on Etsy, then illustrates and writes about.

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The Guardian has published an Idiot's Guide to Sampling, basically an FAQ on the creation, evolution and impact of sampling (thanks, RA, for the tipoff).

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Pal and fellow PopMattersite Rachel Balik wrote a smart piece on how the media might get out of the recession alive by just being, well, kinder.

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Thom Yorke performed The Eraser in its entirety in L.A. on Friday, plus some new tracks and hangers-on from Amnesiac and In Rainbows days. But the ever-discerning Reddit community got me asking, is it any good? Or is Yorke, as I suspected slightly on In Rainbows, verging into veritable Coldplay territory? Let's ask Ian Cohen. (Or you can ask me and I will tell you, "Yes, but I don't really care.")

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Lindsay Lohan as artistic adviser for Emanuel Ungaro? The Times thinks it's gross. So does most of France, apparently. What stands out (what the author draws out by its ponytail) is Lohan's whimsical, uneducated approach to fashion. The industry has a reputation for being a ball of fluff, and people like Lohan are only obscuring the hard work and artistry committed by trained, talented professionals. Or as a commenter on The Awl (which contends that couture is fluff to all but "800 people") put it, "People give Lindsay Lohan tons of money to do things she is bad at. This gives me heartburn." I agree with The Awl in the sense that: What is the point bemoaning the cold hard fact that stupidity is employable?