12 Late Night Thoughts About CMJ

1. A giddy sidewalk gossip girl runs up to you grinning ear-to-ear with the night’s big celebrity sighting and it’s…drum roll…(conspiratorial lean and whisper)…TODD BRIDGES! Huh? Whuuu…. Why? Where? You mean “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis”/ Different Strokes / cocaine / attempted murder /Johnnie Cochran client / Christian motivational speaker / Skating with Celebrities / Celebrity Boxing vs. Vanilla Ice TODD BRIDGES! Outside a frickin’ Little Boots show on the Lower East Side? In a puffy Lakers jacket? This is what stimulates giddiness in the youth of the nation?
2. A young kid with a furrowed brow makes a rather convincing case that MGMT are marginally talented charlatans who suck live and don’t deserve their sudden fame, and you find yourself nodding and thinking, Hey, everybody’s entitled to their opinion, especially about MGMT, and you still have a soft spot for young music geeks passionately holding forth on subjects of indie/ [...]

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How I Got Hooked on ‘Twilight’

So I might have read Twilight.
Okay, I couldn’t put it down and I’m not exactly sure why because the writing is atrocious. I could find excuses — I was sick last weekend, I regretted having prematurely scoffed at Harry Potter — but something about this book is appealing even when it shouldn’t be.

Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen



It’s essentially the story of a dangerously co-dependent relationship: Edward, a vampire, and Bella, the only human whose mind he can’t read, are obsessed with one another and spend literally all their time together. He even watches her when she sleeps, which would normally be grounds for a cautionary After School Special, but in this case, it’s excusable because Bella is constantly imperiled and Edward needs to save her.
Pure wish fulfillment: What could be better to a smitten teenager — well, technically Edward is about 100 years old but we won’t split hairs [...]

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First Listen: New Guns N’ Roses Single Reviewed

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m listening to it on my computer and not, say, in a car, that makes it feel less than real. After all, we’ve been here before: (alleged) tracks from the mythic, Sasquatch-like Chinese Democracy leaked last year, and we downloaded them, tentatively, straining to hear some sort of genetic connection to the Guns N’ Roses we all remember and romanticize. It seemed as if this long story was going to come to an end with a whimper. And a shrug. And here we are again, only without the shady back-alley torrent-site-dealings or fear of RIAA reprisal.

More on SPIN.com:
>> Chinese Democracy Song Released to Radio
>> Chinese Democracy Songlist and Album Art Unveiled!
>> Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy Finally Issued Release Date



“Chinese Democracy,” the first single from the actually-existing Guns N’ Roses album of the same name, was released today. Officially. Legally. (The album [...]

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SPIN.com’s Top 25 MGMT Remixes

Ever since Freelance Hellraiser got the Internet’s nutz in a twist with 2001’s "A Stroke of Genius" — a seamless mash-up of the Strokes’ "Hard to Explain" and Christina Aguilera’s "Genie in a Bottle" — the ultimate, 21st Century tribute to the It rock band of the year has been an endless barrage of (mostly) unauthorized mash-ups, remixes, covers, and alternate versions. And without a doubt, this year’s chosen mashees are Spin’s November cover boychiks MGMT. Here’s an incomplete, but still seemingly endless (25 or so) round-up, in order of my personal preference:

"All My Children" (MGMT vs. LCD Soundsystem), Immuzikation
Immuzikation, a.ka. Athens, Georgia’s Alfredo P. Lapuz, Jr., is the mash-up man of the moment, and this extended massaging of LCD’s "All My Friends" (basically a mash-up of Steve Reich and New Order, anyway) with MGMT’s "Kids" is a fascinating mix of aging hipster regret and childlike hipster nostalgia. The soundtrack [...]

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‘Gossip Girl’: the Music Grows Up — OMFG!

In anticipation of this week’s episode of Gossip Girl, I spent a few minutes surfing its music channel on YouTube, where the featured songs of each episode are posted along with a short description of the various scenes (e.g. “Chuck and Nate lounge in grass”). A great tool for finding music, the channel has the added bonus of making songs available Monday morning, so you can hear the vibe before you watch the show.
This week, Snow Patrol provide the obligatory party track. And the Virgins’ “One Week of Danger” returns as Blair and Chuck’s unofficial theme (first heard last season over flashbacks of the infamous limo scene).

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>> Marky Mark, Won’t You Please Come Back?
>> Indie Rockers Find New Fans in the Preschool Set
>> Oliver Stone’s ‘W’: This Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore



But the three other tracks set an uncharacteristically brooding tone, from the Black Keys’ banjo-tinged blues [...]

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Marky Mark, Won’t You Please Come Back?

Dear Mr. Wahlberg:

As you probably know, you have a new movie out today. It’s called Max Payne and from what I can tell, you play a zombie policeman. In your last movie, The Happening, you played a science teacher scared of trees. The one before that was called We Own the Night. Your character got shot in the face. It’s been hard watching you humbled.
It doesn’t have to be this way. You can turn things around. Start by leaving the acting to your brother Donnie.
Just the other night, I was doing some late night channel surfing when Donnie’s Miami gangster flick Kings of South Beach came on. He’s soooo gritty in it. Let him be the thespian Wahlberg. What you need to do is get back in touch with an old friend — someone the American public used to love. In fact, they loved him so much that he had [...]

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Indie Rockers Find New Fans in the Preschool Set

This weekend I watched Feist’s "1234" video at least 15 times.

My two-and-a-half-year-old niece is obsessed. As soon as I arrived at my brother’s house in Louisville on Friday, Rilla requested we play "the blue dress song." I figured she was referring to some Disney princess tune with talking birds, but she quickly put me in my place. "Feist," she said, the duh implicit.

The video took a minute to load on my brother’s ancient iMac, causing Rilla to thoughtfully announce, "It’s buffering" (no joke). But as soon as the gentle guitar strumming began, Rilla was off, matching Feist move for move and word for word, spinning around the living room with a giant grin stretched between her dimpled cheeks. After a while, I was invited to join her. We even bowed at the end of the performance, just like Feist.

"Again?" Rilla asked, as soon as the video went black.

How could I [...]

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7 Thoughts About Against Me! Live

1. Still touring in support of New Wave, the best album of 2007, the Gainesville-based punks showed no signs of tiring, playing as if this were the first gig in their hometown after a six-year absence.

2. Live, the songs off the Butch Vig–produced album sounded spectacular, all beefy riffs, sweaty shouting, and huge heart. If released, say, five years ago, when the music business wasn’t in such obvious chaos, New Wave might’ve been a game changer a la Nevermind or London Calling. Now we’ll never know. BTW, is it time to pour out a 40 for the game-changing album?

More on SPIN.com:
>> Against Me! Frontman Tom Gabel’s Web Video Series
>> Review: Against Me!, New Wave (Sire)
>> Album of the Year: Against Me!
>> Video: The New Wave of Against Me!

3. When guitarist James Bowman sang Tegan Quin’s lines on "Borne on the FM Waves of the Heart," the band [...]

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I Started a Joke (or Careful: MGMT at Play), Vol. 1

There have been many days, more than I care to remember, when the Bee Gees’ 1968 ballad "I Started a Joke" (written and sung by Robin Gibb) was the only song that made any sense of a world that seemed hellbent on shoving overblown, insincere nonsense down our throats and making us pay for the privilege with a tragically forced Olan Mills smile.

While a lute-like acoustic guitar rustles and a cymbal tinkles, Robin emotes (as if John Lennon were being lightly choked with a scarf): "I started a joke, which started the whole world crying / But I didn’t see that the joke was on me, oh no / I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing / Oh, if I’d only seen that the joke was on me." (The joke was really on Robin when he left the group after continuing to battle with older brother Barry [...]

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Why America Needs Oasis

Following their mega-successful debut double shot of 1994’s Definitely Maybe and 1995’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, Oasis were poised to rule the rock game. But 1997’s underwhelming Be Here Now put an end to that.

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>> The SPIN Interview: Noel Gallagher
>> Review: Oasis, Dig Out Your Soul
>> Oasis Call Police on Crazed Fan
>> Oasis’ Noel Gallagher: "I’m on Painkillers"
>> Oasis’ Noel Gallagher: "I Tried to Kill Liam!"
>> News Alert: Noel Gallagher Has a Sense of Humor!

Ever since, the band has been stuck in rock’n’roll Triple-A. Not quite major leaguers on par with Coldplay, the Chili Peppers, or Radiohead, but able to fill arenas nonetheless. And even though the new Dig Out Your Soul is a welcome return to the supersonic guitars and straightforward songwriting of those early albums, Oasis’s cultural moment has passed. The brothers Gallagher won’t be getting called back [...]

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