Today’s Wall Street Journal takes a look at a clutch of musicians who have decided to get notoriety—if not cash—by writing songs about the recession, although I’m guessing that the Journal didn’t want to do the songwriters in question any favors. Why? Because the paper took the time to print the awful lyrics these people have come up with in order to suck up the YouTube hits from people looking for “bailout” or “Fannie Mae.” Seriously, the lyrical stylings exhibited after the jump made me appreciate “Weird Al” Yankovic’s recession-ready remake of T.I.’s “Whatever You Like” a lot more.
Animal Collective’s Fleet Foxes-slobbered-on, Kanye-endorsed video for “My Girls” has been bumpin’ around for a few days and has been getting some pretty positive praise, despite generally looking like an expensive version of Green Man from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. And more than any lyric on Merriweather Post Pavilion, the chorus to “My Girls” has people Tweetinging or Tumblring or whatever the fuck they do now. The most common reading on (always-accurate!!!11) lyric sites is:
In this week’s AV Club, multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird drops the controversial soundbite “When you think indie rock, you think more about haircuts and fashion than about music.” Somehow, this has yet to be picked up by outraged bloggers (maybe because they think he’s right? oooh snap), but it made me I wonder just what other tags and adjectives and bits of shorthand have been rendered free of any sort of music-related meaning by misuse, overuse, or just your normal wear and tear. Bird’s full quote after the jump, so you can think it over!
Most critics have a love-hate relationship with album reviews. On the one hand, they’re an absurdly limiting format, forcing you to find things to say about albums you don’t care about, limiting your thoughts on albums you do care about, and requiring a bottom-line consumer reccomendation that might not really encapsulate your honest feelings. On the other hand, in these hard times for music scribes, record reviews are the one unique service we can provide that the public always seems to want. Which is why it seems crazy that Alernative Press was considering removing album reviews from its print edition.
In an interview with The Advocate, Beth Ditto says her rad-lib queer credentials make her a lesser-of-two-evils voter, with the attendant “George Bush is an illegal-immigrant-raping super-Nazi with a fire-spurting devil’s head on his cock” quote that will be making the blog rounds today. But I’m more interested in her specious “correction” of the flap that bubbled up after her nekkid NME cover and its attendant interview:
