Lists

Making Amazon’s “Top Indie Albums Of All Time” List Stuns Stereolab Into Silence

noah | April 3, 2009 10:00 am
noah | April 3, 2009 10:00 am

Stereolab have announced that they are immediately going on hiatus; their album Chemical Chords 2 is still going to come out, but the band has canceled two shows that it was scheduled to play in the coming weeks and has no plans to record any music for the foreseeable future. Why now? Why so sudden? A statement on the band’s Web site explains: “As we recently made #51 with Emperor Tomato Ketchup in the Amazon 100 Greatest Indie Rock Albums of all Time we feel that our work is done for the moment.” See, people? More evidence that the listicle era is ruining lives.* A few clips from the album in question after the jump.

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Is Feb. 27 Too Early To Declare Your Favorite Albums Of The Year So Far?

noah | February 27, 2009 5:30 am
noah | February 27, 2009 5:30 am

Apparently not, if this NPR blogger’s list—which is topped by the Antlers’ Hospice—is anything to go by. And another site has even snagged a domain name that assures it’ll at least be atop the Google searches for peoples’ favorite records of the year. And yes, OK, OK, I’m guilty of this premature ranking too, albeit in a way that’s much more shape-shifty than the Ten-Album List On A Blog-Shaped Stone Tablet Post from the public radio behemoth’s site. Anyway, feel free to list your favorites from this still-young year in this site’s comments, or peruse other two-month rundowns I found on the Web after the jump!

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Lists

noah | November 21, 2008 6:00 am
noah | November 21, 2008 6:00 am

deathmagneticcover.jpgThis weekend is going to be a bit shorter than usual thanks to Chinese Democracy coming out Sunday and the American Music Awards happening Sunday night, so I figured I’d leave you with a snippet of a discussion that I had with Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan, where I attempted to figure out why the indie-heavy stretch of that Blender albums list rubbed me the not-right way earlier today: “I guess maybe part of what I’m also trying (clumsily) to say is that I miss the days of the lost major-label gem? The good album that wasn’t by a megastar (either major-label ‘celebrity’ level or Jenny Lewis ‘covered by every music publication’ level—you can sub Lucinda Williams in for JL if you want) that was still worthy of recognition? That middle seems to have been lost in the great polarization between ‘music-related celebrities’ and ‘people who really mean it, man,’ and it’s a shame, because there are still tons of worthy albums out there that could have used the boost. (Maybe I’m drawing too much on personal experience here, but I do think these lists have some power, still, in this every-ear-for-itself age.)” But am I expecting too much from a wrapup that’s ultimately the result of a slightly massaged consensus?

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Bye Bye Bye: What We’ve Learned From Pop’s “TRL” Era

mariasci | November 17, 2008 2:45 am
mariasci | November 17, 2008 2:45 am

Last night, TRL said goodbye, and while doing so, it listed the ten most influential videos that hit it big on the program. Normally, a TRL list wouldn’t be worth the oaktag its cue cards were printed on, but surprisingly, whoever made the picks for this list pretty much nailed it; the ten songs truly did define the five-year span during which pop was ruled by MTV’s afternoon countdown show. You rarely see an era officially ending, and you almost never get the era to sum itself up so accurately, so now that we’re five years past TRL‘s hegemony, let’s try and figure out what it was like–and figure out what era we’re in now.

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“Rolling Stone” Gets (Somewhat Predictably) Vocal

anonocritic | November 14, 2008 11:00 am
anonocritic | November 14, 2008 11:00 am

Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who’s contributed to many of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of Rolling Stone:

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The Internet’s Seven Worst Music-Related Halloween Costumes

noah | October 27, 2008 11:00 am
noah | October 27, 2008 11:00 am

In the rush to put together The Perfect Halloween Costume (That Isn’t Sarah Palin Or The Chick Who Carved The B In Her Face), some of you might choose to peruse the offerings of some of the Internet’s costume merchants. And some of you, in this time where pop music seems to land somewhere between “public TV pledge drives” and “the TV Guide crossword” on the pop-cultural radar, might even want to theme your costume themed around some sort of music in-joke. We here at Idolator are here to help you fashion the right pop-related getup, so in the interest of performing a public service, here are seven outfits that you should pretty much avoid at all costs this Halloween. Even if you’re really in need of a last-minute costume on Friday.

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Toppling ‘The Wall’: The Farce Of Double-Counting In The RIAA’s All-Time Platinum List

Chris Molanphy | September 17, 2008 3:00 am
Chris Molanphy | September 17, 2008 3:00 am

Reading the New York Times obituary of Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright yesterday, I came upon a statistic that the newspaper ran unquestioningly that ticked me off, as it always does when I see similar statements in print:

Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, “The Wall,” eventually sold 23 million copies in the United States.

No, it didn’t, I grumbled to myself. It’s a double-album—by RIAA math, that means it sold about 11.5 million. SNARL!

There are many things wrong with the Recording Industry Association of America’s system for certifying albums gold, platinum, multiplatinum, and (now) diamond. There’s the counting of records shipped, not sold; I’ve seen discs certified platinum that have actually SoundScanned fewer than 700,000 copies. On the other side of the ledger, there are discs that are under-certified because of the RIAA’s outmoded system requiring labels to request certification—short-changing dozens of classic Motown artists, for example.

But nothing in the RIAA metals methodology sticks in my craw more than double-counting. It’s the biggest scam in record-industry self-tallying, and the main reason it’s infuriating is the very example cited above: journalists and music fans the world over use the RIAA’s certs as their yardstick for all-time album sales. It’s basically a total distortion of rock history.

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Another Long Weekend Brings Another Long List-Making Exercise

noah | August 29, 2008 2:00 am
noah | August 29, 2008 2:00 am

borntorun.jpgOver the Independence Day weekend, I challenged you guys to pick one favorite album for each year that you’ve been alive, and you all certainly rose to the occasion. So I figured I’d give it another go–only this time, with songs instead of full-lengths. Obviously, picking a “favorite” song from each year would take longer than a three-day weekend, and possibly drive you utterly mad in the process. So let’s do it this way: Craft a mix CD that contains one track representing each year of your life, in order. This way, you can transfer any fretting you might have about whether or not “Last Child” or “Beth” should be your representative for 1976 to whether or not 1990’s outro transitions well into 1991’s intro. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still difficult, but at least it won’t send you on a holiday trip to the sanitarium, where you’ll only have the Jerry Lewis Labor Day telethon to accompany your murmurings about whether “White Belly” is superior to “Rid Of Me.” My stab at it, after the jump.

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A Long Listmaking Exercise For A Long Weekend

noah | July 3, 2008 5:00 am
noah | July 3, 2008 5:00 am

toys.jpgToday’s list that’s going around some blogs that I read: List the albums you like most from each year that you’ve been alive. It sounds simple, right? But in making a list like this, you realize things about yourself, like how Aerosmith’s peak for me came right around the year I was born, even though I didn’t really hear them until many years later. And how 2004 was something of a weak year for my personal canon, while 1989 was a really huge year for it, one where I had to pick between Like A Prayer, Doolittle, Cocked & Loaded, Full Moon Fever, and the album I finally wound up selecting. Anyway, peruse my list after the jump–Anthony made one too–and feel free to pick mine apart/make your own, although I should warn you that it took me a while to do. (I’m usually loath to use Wikipedia as a source, but its lists of album releases were helpful to cross-reference with Amazon, as were the Pazz & Jop rundowns on Robert Christgau’s site.) If people enjoy this exercise, maybe we’ll do singles lists next week! Or, hell, runners-up lists, since some of these “best” decisions were a lot harder than others.

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“Entertainment Weekly” Best-Albums List Reveals Every Problem With (And Advantage Of) General-Interest Listicles

noah | June 20, 2008 7:30 am
noah | June 20, 2008 7:30 am

jun272008_999_1000.jpgDespite sagging page counts, general print-media malaise, and the fact that they’re still saddled with that Diablo Cody column, Entertainment Weekly found reason to celebrate this week: It’s the magazine’s 1,000th issue, and in honor of that milestone the editorial team there put together a buttload of lists of “New Classics,” arbitrary best-of rundowns that supposedly quantify the best pieces of pop culture of the past 25 years. The list-craziness is apparently the latest step in EW‘s plan to turn itself into a printed-and-stapled blog, which has resulted in more meandering first-person front-of-book pieces and, well, Cody’s occasional game of “Spot The Reference.” The centerpiece of the issue’s music-related offerings is a 100-album list that’s supposedly meant to count down the best albums that came out between 1983 and now–it’s bookended by the soundtrack to Purple Rain and George Michael’s Faith–and because I needed something to do, I organized it by year.

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