Ah, this is the Mark Sinker passage I was looking for but not finding last weekend when I wrote my little critique of Spin's "Top 100 Alternative Albums Of The 1960s." It was here at koganbot, four years ago, down in a comment thread, coming later in the overall discussion than I'd realized:

here's what i'm objecting to, cast as a fable: [band xyz ( Read more... )

I hate the term "alternative," but that doesn't mean I get to dismiss other people's use of it.

When Christopher Weingarten sent his list of potential acts for Spin's '60s alternative roundup, I wrote back that they should get rid of the Velvets, Stooges, and Leonard Cohen and put Vanilla Fudge, Rare Earth, and Iron Butterfly in their stead. Was ( Read more... )

Our dear friend Wikipedia put forth this sentence, which I found highly entertaining:

"As she was raised in the United States, Wang was exposed to many classic pop music acts, including but not limited to: The Beatles, Queen, and Oingo Boingo."

I was immediately inspired to write the following:

As he was raised in the United States, Kogan was ( Read more... )

Just posted this on the ilX Rolling Music Writers' Thread in response to some unthought-through statements from Matos and Weingarten ( Read more... )

dubdobdee over on the poptimists answer record/fanfic thread:

some of the prob with "theory-dependent" crit -- not just music crit either -- is that there's a deferred fandom going on: viz yr "allowed" to be critical of tarantino but you have to treat eg foucault [but basically insrt guru of choice]* as if it's a different level of thinking; there's a very ( Read more... )

h/t petronia

FORECAST 2009 for PISCES born MARCH 12: MARS, URANUS, NEPTUNE, and PLUTO are your protecting planets during 2009. The week of MARCH 22** starts on with GOOD NEWS. Having planet MERCURY (effectiveness) joining URANUS is a great way to materialize whatever project you thought impossible to accomplish just a few months ago. Your gain? ( Read more... )

"In 18xx, Alexis Bouvard hypothesized that deviations in the expected orbit of Uranus could be due to the influence of an as yet unseen planet orbiting farther out ( Read more... )

Tom's been posting on both his Tumblrs about "opinion leaders," his questions seeming to be: to what extent are there such creatures; do those outfits who claim to have the special ability to identify opinion leaders actually know what they're doing; and where these creatures have apparently been identified, is there any special value in trying to ( Read more... )