Well, well…Pitchfork handed down one of its dreaded 0.0 ratings this week, for Vice’s This Is Next compilation of indie rock for the Wal-Mart record shopper. Now, I agree with Matt LeMay’s assessment that this is a rather pointless venture from the usually savvy Vice label, but was it really worth the effort to “review?”
There […]

My other CITU&SIO columns thus far have been very high-profile (at least in our world, natch) releases with quite a bit of collective attention from the blogosphere, and my assessments more or less jived with the general consensus. Enter Bishop Allen & The Broken String, the sophomore LP from this prolific group of Harvard alums […]

My most recent nonfiction read was Clinton Heylin’s From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock, which, as the title handily states, covers the New York rock scene form the late 60’s through the early 80’s. It’s one of a few books on that time period that I’ve devoured in the […]

The University of Chicago released a study this week that essentially called foul on Mayor Daley and the city for not supporting its music industry. U of C (also known as Quantitative U) compared the economic impact of the rock and the roll on he 50 most populous metropolitan areas of the U.S., looking […]

I had a good pal, who has recently embarked on an unpaid second career as a correspondent for a startup online cultural magazine, call me this afternoon while I was driving back from a family weekend in northern Wisconsin with an amusing request for advice: how should she conduct an in-person interview with Tom Araya […]