It’s the last audition round before we move on to Hollywood, and thank God for it. Speaking of God, this evening’s show comes to us from Oklahoma City, where Texas goes to die; the hopefuls are lined up by 5:18 AM, because there is nothing else to do there. The episode leads in with a montage of people chasing their hats, but I think Miller’s ( Read more... )

Oh, boy! Tonight is the San Antonio episode, and because I have psychic powers, I predict: (a) Alamo (b) Riverwalk (c) those giant boots at North Star Mall (d) cracks about how everything is bigger in Texas, possibly accompanying footage of a fat guy. Sure enough, all these things come true in five seconds! (The fat guy is Randy Jackson, eating a ( Read more... )

This evening poised quite a theological conundrum. On the one hand, American Idol is only an hour long, which seems to be evidence that God loves me and wants me to be happy. On the other hand, the reason American Idol is only an hour long is that Glee is back, which is an equally convincing argument that God hates me and wants me to suffer. I ( Read more... )

Tonight promises to be a volatile episode of American Idol, if that combination of words makes sense in the English language, because this is the infamous Nicki Minaj Meltdown audition. Yes, we’re stranded in Charlotte-town, North Kakalaka, home of the North American Car Racing Car Sports Car Association. You can tell, because they give Ryan ( Read more... )

Last night’s Idol premiere took place in New York, and for me, it didn’t illicit much in the way of sympathy. It was filmed too long ago to get any endearing post-Sandy sob stories, so my overall impression was one of schadenfreude whenever someone would get sent packing: yeah! Take that, you stupid living-in-the-center-of-the-cultural-universe ( Read more... )

Oh, my dearests. If I told you how excited I was about the season premiere of American Idol, would you think less of me? If I told you that I plan on blogging about it for the rest of the season, would you stop reading this site? If I said you had a beautiful body, would you give me a hand-job? So many questions. So few answers.

With the caveat ( Read more... )

Another Mayan apocalypse come and gone, and here we still are, writing end-of-year recaps.  Searching for an overarching metaphor for the most annoying year in the history of music criticism proved difficult, as no comparison seemed worth of encapsulating the unique blend of lazy and self-righteous that characterized 2012.  Was this the year that ( Read more... )

Every month, this site will be stricken with insomnia and provide content in the form of letting its iTunes shuffle go berserk and jotting down a few notes on the resulting 6 songs.  It will do this in hopes of disguising the fact that it no longer finds keeping up with the new-music hype cycle either rewarding or remunerative, and that it is, at ( Read more... )

The recent cultural fisticuffs over Amanda Palmer’s initial decision to hire local musicians to play for her in exchange for the non-negotiable instruments of “beer and hugs” has rippled far beyond Palmer herself, becoming a talking point in a larger conversation about what it means to be an artist in the digital age.  (Palmer eventually made the ( Read more... )

Of all my many musical obsessions, the one I have the most trouble explaining - let alone defending - is my love for unadulterated field recordings.  That’s probably because they’re not music at all, in the traditional sense; they are not composed, they are not performed, they are not even subject to the most basic elements of musical structure.   ( Read more... )