new favorite.

tech support call [from the idolator podcast. click here to subscribe]

i added them to my music blog bookmarks after evaluating stereogum readers' picks of 2006 a month back, but haven't really dug into idolator until tonight. you know by now my mindless morning schedule -- well, the past couple hours have been spent with idolator alone (and i only made it as far back in the archives as last tuesday). i haven't been this intimate with anything since... well, that's just embarrassing.

Like Vioxx and the Patriot Act, music blogs were supposed to improve our lives: At a time when only a handful of carefully manicured acts could sleaze their way into the top 10, the music blogosphere was going to serve as the great equalizer, deflating the MTV-assisted hype machines and giving the asleep-at-the-wheel music mags a run for their ad money. They were as DIY as the zine movement and as musically savvy as the college-radio jockeys of the '80s. Finally, the power was in the hands of the people--very nerdy people, mind you, but they were a lot better than the record execs whose biggest claim to fame was discovering Crazy Town.

For a while, it seemed to be working--without Internet support, it's doubtful that bands like Cold War Kids or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah would have ascended so quickly. But in the last year, the music-blog netherworld has become as homogenized and indistinguishable as the record labels themselves. What used to be a wildly unpredictable chorus of opinions has been solidified into a cabal, one that consists of a half-dozen or so self-empowered pasty white dudes daisy-chaining each others' opinions, all using an adjective-addled lexicon that's one part Lester Bangs, one part street-person crazy talk. Meanwhile, the bands are all starting to sound the same; If we hear one more band that sounds like a cross between Pavement and Talking Heads, we're going to stab ourselves in the eye with an aqua-colored Nano.
[idolator manifesto]

also of note, stereogum gets served and idolator's banned-from-blogs word list.

at this point in the post, it's just fun to say, "idolator." idolator idolator idolator...