Well, the big story this week was probably the shuttering of Blender, the pop magazine who suffered the one-two punch of being a printed entity about music in 2009. Blender‘s overarching popism was a big influence on Idolator from the time of its launch in 2006, and even as the death spiral of ad pages resulted in its once-mighty reviews section being whittled down to a handful of 130-word blurbs, I admired its spunk and willingness to reach across the musical comfort zones that divide people more often than not these days, if not always its choices of “hot,” vaguely music-related cover subjects. After the jump, thoughts on the Blender closure from a smattering of people around the Internet, many of whom saw their bylines appear in the magazine’s pages at one time or another.
So over the weekend, a (false!) rumor that rock critic heavy Robert Christgau died made its way around the Internet, with Christgau’s Wikipedia entry being one of the chief culprits in spreading the news. I figured that the entry’s talk page–on which the nerdier denizens of the people-edited online guide dispute the finer points of others’ edits–would provide at least a minute or so of vaguely amusing obituary-dispute reading, but what I came across was even better: a section titled “How legit is this guy?”
Former Village Voice music editor Robert Christgau wrote his last Consumer Guide two weeks before he was fired from the paper; his capsule-review column has found a home on MSN, where it’ll run bimonthly. More »
– The Rolling Stones’ Bill Clinton-honoring show proves that there are, in fact, velvet-rope guards out there who can’t be bought off. The catch? They all work for the Secret Service. More »
