Blonde Bond Daniel Craig and cell phone pitchman Noel Gallagher got into the kind of fake celebrity spat that the British tabloids manufacture daily by using the patented system of drawing two celebrity names out of a hat, asking them about one another, and then creating a headline that seems salacious—“Daniel Craig baits Noel Gallagher over guitar skills jibe,” in this case–-until you read the story and realize that nothing all that interesting happened.
In this case, Craig was questioned at a movie premiere about Noel Gallagher’s assertion that Craig should play him in the (inevitable?) Oasis biopic. Craig said he was too old for the role (he’s one year younger in reality), and that, anyway, he was better at guitar. I did some digging to see if I could find 007 jamming out on the guitar, but I was met with crickets and tumbleweeds. (The British beefcake apparently does enjoy a game of Guitar Hero now and again, but that really ain’t the same thing.)
In a comment on his Morrissey review earlier this week, fellow Idolatorian Mike Barthel mentioned that his antipathy toward Animal Collective was so strong, he couldn’t even understand why other people liked them:
Why do I hate AC? I’ve gotten into it elsewhere, and yeah, like Maura said, there hasn’t really been a proper platform to air any writer’s grievances at length. I just really, really don’t like them, to the point that I don’t even really understand why other people like them. I actually spent about an hour today talking to a former AC-hata who was trying to talk me into liking the new album, and I gave it an honest, serious try, and it made me want to stab knitting needles in my eyes.
Peter, Bjorn, and John premiered a nameless non-goofy-instrumental-album single on Kanye West’s blogs, of all places. Though in this era of artists leaking artists, it’s as good a place as any. Heckfire, I’d love for Kanye to post my music on his blog, right next to mod lamps, big-bootied models, and shoes I could never afford in a million years. I think it’s a savvy decision on PB&J’s part, and it bespeaks a desire on their part for further mainstream and crossover success. Some of Yeezy’s commentariat approve:
LiberatedWriter | January 6, 2009
Ok…
This is totally HOT like Fleetwood Mac on wax…
HOT+++NESS.halo40 | January 6, 2009
Sounds dope, and i like their work!!!!!!leFtofOrdiNarY | January 6, 2009
that’s a Funky little gem … I like it, thanks for sharing KW.
ps. Congrats on 808’s platinum status.
“Jon Bon Jovi May Send Hillary’s Campaign Out In… More »
Nielsen SoundScan has released its year-end numbers for music sales, and perhaps unsurprisingly, they aren’t all that great—no albums cracked the three-million-sold mark this year, with Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III almost getting there (2.874 million) and every other album in the top 10, um, not. Thanks to SoundScan’s Dec. 31-to-Dec. 28 chart year, the top single was Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love,” which shifted 3.42 million digital singles and bested Wayne’s “Lollipop” by some 260,000 units. Top 10s after the jump.
THE GOOD: Perhaps most intriguing to me was the number of latecomers that showed up in the album chart’s top 10: Taylor Swift’s Fearless, released Nov. 11, came in at No. 3; AC/DC’s Black Ice, released Oct. 20, ended the year at No. 5; and Beyoncé’s I Am…Sasha Fierce, which didn’t come out until a week and a half before Thanksgiving, squeaked into the No. 10 spot.
THE BAD: Album sales? Down 14%. Overall album sales, which include “track equivalent albums”? Down 8.5%. But hey, vinyl LP sales were up 89%! Of course the 1.88 million LPs sold represents about .43% of the total album picture, but just think of what this’ll mean for the heightened presence of that Animal Collective vinyl release on Tuesday!
THE WHAAA? Rihanna may have been the top-selling digital tracks artist, selling 9.941 million copies of her various radio-ready hits in single-serving format, but her album sales were nowhere near that, even with the reworking of Good Girl Gone Bad that tacked on the seemingly inescapable “Disturbia” and that Maroon 5 song that went pretty much nowhere. Maybe we can blame Adam Levine for this, since his track was the only “album-only” track on that reissue?
Albums, singles, concerts, music videos,… More »
When 2008 started, I was sure it was going to be awesome. “It’s going to be two-thousand-great,” I told anyone who would listen, ignoring the various signs (MTV ringing in the New Year with Tila Tequila, hints of economic collapse, etc.) that things wouldn’t exactly go as planned. Or even be much good at all. But at least there was music to help the seemingly endless parade of bad news plod along a bit more jauntily, right?
THE GOOD: Getting back into R & B full-throttle thanks to Ne-Yo, Erykah Badu, Estelle, and Solange; Ida Maria’s twitchy “Oh My God,” which I am going to try and have every person I know hear at least once over the course of the coming months; Prince and Jarvis Cocker owning gigantic open spaces; Ne-Yo turning girls into goo.
THE BAD: You don’t want to hear about the bad aspects of my 2008. (And honestly, typing a blow-by-blow out would just depress me all over again.) So instead I’ll note that I often hate making lists because even though they’re supposed to be overviews, they’re inevitably of the specific moment at which the list was made, which means that completely worthy entrants will get slighted, or pushed out by space limitations, etc. Here’s a “sorry” to Black Mountain’s In The Future, the Air Miami demos that were reissued by Teen Beat, Panic At The Disco’s Pretty. Odd., Deastro’s “The Shaded Forests,” The Academy Is…’s Fast Times At Barrington High, Jazmine Sullivan’s “Bust Your Windows,” and the Robin Thicke record that was mysteriously forgotten about by everyone.
THE WHAAAA? Before August, if you had said that I would have put Billy Joel on any list that didn’t count down the reasons my ninth-grade social studies class was completely absurd (hi there, three-day lesson on “We Didn’t Start The Fire”), I would have laughed so, so hard. And yet, his show at Shea Stadium was totally solid, not only because of his undeniable showmanship but for the ways it stoked my nostalgia about growing up on Long Island.
“There are so many little dyings that it doesn’t matter which of them is death,” wrote esteemed poet/ author Kenneth Patchen. Yet the accrual of such dying over the course of a calendar year belies such “little”ness. As we nudge into the 21st century, the luminaries of the previous one begin to wane, the architects and innovators of prime American music forms: blues, jazz, folk, rock. The obituary page for 2008 may not feature so many marquee names, but the crucial people behind the stage—the gurus, the producers, the poster artists, the record executives, the session men—all continued to vanish as well.
We lost studio drummers like Earl Palmer and guitarist Robert Ward, Phil Spector’s engineer Phil Levine, jazz photographer William Claxton, Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black, Thelonious Monk saxophonist Johnny Griffin. Number groups diminished by one, be they the Count Five, the Four Tops, the Dave Clark Five, or the Kingston Trio. Here are a few of the folks-–some well-known, some never heard of— whose work and influence created a great resonance here and whose efforts will hopefully continue to reverberate in the generations to come.
When it’s a rough year, some people instinctively reach for the serotonin-spike of all-smiles pop. Though I did play the hell out of that Alphabeat song, I’m generally one of those listeners who’d rather wallow in my funk. Give me hard times and I want a wrist-scarring playlist to match. And to go by the ever-reliable iTunes “Most Played” metric, my favorite new record of 2008—a year that felt poised for planetwide batshit breakdown—was the sonically variegated result of comically extended woodshedding by a much-mourned but presumed-mothballed trio who’d previously minted a very specific brand of drizzly Brit glumness. (Phew.)
Yet for as many blue moods and bad days and seasonally affected stretches Third soundtracked during the second half of my 2008, it sounded just as good on first release, during an all-too-brief and buoyant springtime. (Just in case it sounds like the trip’s only effective as some kinda reverse SSRI.) But I’d be lying if I said Third‘s long, dark tunnel didn’t just sound better during rain-slicked and overcast days, overtired early morning commutes, and evenings of sleepless worry. I had plenty of all three in 2008, and there was always Third, a new pal with a pleasing permafrown. Like I asked back in March, who was waiting for the first sunny entry in the Portishead discography?
Note: The above picture was taken while driving down Sunrise Highway in Massapequa, N.Y., yesterday. I swear. If only I’d looked inside to see if any inventory was still there, moulding over after two years of inactivity…
On Friday night, a friend and I were at my parents’ local mall, and as often happens with me, the conversation turned to music; specifically, country artist Eric Church, and his 2006 album Sinners Like Me. “I’d like to hear that album,” my pal said, “and I bet my dad would like it too. Do you think there’s anyplace in the mall where we can pick it up?”
