Wednesday, January 24, 2007

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...

2 Comments:

Blogger CVA said...

M. Ward is completely sold out : (

8:12 AM  
Blogger china said...

An idolator. An Idol Ate Her.

Other words I'd like to add to the list: (if I may ^_^)

Hott: Often used on Xanga (pronounced ZAn-Guh, not Ex-An-guh) and myspace, "Hott," "Hawt," or such variations of the word "hot" used to describe the attractiveness of a guy/girl sounds absurd outside of its given colloquial status. Destroy this word!!!!! (Especially "that's hot," a Paris Hilton catchphrase)

Ghetto- What the fuck is this supposed to mean? Something's "ghetto"? I've heard it used in both positive and negative ways... "that music is so ghetto" means that the music is, um, "hott." (Ha!) Ok. Sorry... back to the point. A few paragraphizzles later, we find the same term used to describe something disfunctional, "my phone is so ghetto, the screen doesn't even work." Blech.

Those have always been pet peeves of mine.

I also saw this one ytmnd I thought you'd like. It's called My Bible Fanfic.

8:53 PM  

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