Man, those Hot Chip guys sure love irony. They’re in the middle off a month-long tour promoting Zune (remember Zune?) that will take them to Coachella–and then they’re headed to Berlin to do their post-modern thing at the iTunes Festival! So whether you prefer AAC or WMA, you can easily get your hands on the best album of 2008. But which company does the band have more love for?
Soulja Boy! He’s popular. Well, he sells singles. Not so much albums. But a lot of singles! So many singles. And YouTube hits. He attracts the YouTube hits. All related to a dance. A dance you may have heard, seen, or tried to do yourself! You’d think at this point there’s not a single thing left to be said about Soulja Boy and the mini-trend of choreographed toe-tapping that he’s sparked among aspiring popular musicians, one that’s profitable for labels for the moment but not a particularly safe long term bet for reversing dipping sales. And you’d be right! Yet that fact has not stopped the Wall Street Journal from devoting many hundreds of words to recapping the tale of Soulja Boy. He’s divisive! He’s reopened the generation gap! He’s given MC Hammer a reason to go on! And yet despite its rehashery, the WSJ‘s story does raise one important, semi-new, mostly implied question: Would rock bands be improved by their own dance routines? Is there room in indie for cranking that James Murphy?
I’m still not 100% sold on Hot Chip’s (a little too) winsomely goofy wuss disco despite the fact that the U.K. group has grown on me (a little), but any regular Idolator reader should know that I am all about the Pet Shop Boys and the 1989 Batman flick. More »
Hot Chip’s appropriately titled “My Piano” plinked onto the Internet over the weekend. It’s the first track to emerge from DJ-Kicks, the forthcoming !K7 compilation that finds the British electro-poppers compiling some of the favorite songs, including tracks from This Heat, Young Leek, and Joe… More »
This iffy frame-grab doesn’t do it justice, but the newish clip for Hot Chip’s “Arrest Yourself” is suitably geeked-out, breaking the band down into a series of ones and zeroes. Is it the greatest video of all time? No. More »
This reworking of British singer Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” which pairs the salty chanteuse with Idolator favorites Hot Chip, sweetens the original just a bit, adding a few glitchy touches while stretching Winehouse’s detox-resistant track out to almost twice its original length. More »
We promise to some day stop blabbering about Hot Chip–the British outfit that has seemingly written or remixed just about every blog-beloved single of the last few months–but today will not be that day: They’ve just put a new single on their MySpace page (it’s down for now,… More »
We try to not mention the excellent British combo Hot Chip every day, but reading the coverage of last night’s CMJ show had us feeling left out. More »
Anyone who’s seen British act Hot Chip in concert has inevitably turned to their friend and asked, “Why don’t they sound this good on the album?” before going back to strip-mining his or her glo-stick for possible hallucinogens. More »
