The Blog

Before you watch the YouTube video after the jump—and you really do need to watch this video—please make sure to make note of its title: "Afghan Women By Ron Artest edit By Lucky."

The University of Michigan's newspaper, the Michigan Daily, has a good article that uses the microcosm of the Ann Arbor record-store scene to talk about the business of selling music on a macrocosmic level. Most of the piece isn't too encouraging, as you'd expect, but I still got a warm feeling just from thinking about the great Ann Arbor music stores I used to spend so much time in. Wazoo Records was huge for me when I was growing up near the city, and I've probably bought more music from them than from any single other record store. And the meticulously organized and haphazardly shelved (literally) tons of records at Encore are basically a shrine to both the vinyl album and the obsessive hoarding of it. It's one of the single best record stores ever. Here is a perfect description of the store and its joys from the Daily piece:

"There's something about walking into Encore, in a space where the titles are almost falling down because the stacks are so high," [U. of M. assistant professor of musicology Mark] Clague says. "And you get a visceral sense, a physical sense, a psychic sense of the kind of legacy and amount of art that's been created that there is to grasp . . . If you just started at one end and tried to listen your way through the store, you'd die before you made it 10 feet past the front entrance."

If you're enough of a record geek that a four-and-a-half-hour drive seems like a fair trade for some serious crate digging, you owe it to yourself to make a pilgrimage there.

(via the Daily Swarm)

Some exceptionally intense cello playing, courtesy of Flickr user Robert Loerzel.

From the Reader's music Flickr pool, which is of course open to your photos as well.

I am very happy that somebody made a song based around Carl Sagan talking and whooping. Sagan was an amazing man, and since he was also a devoted pot smoker I'm sure he would've dug the song's super-chill vibe. I'm just kind of bummed that so many people, even ones who write for respected online music publications, keep referring to it as being "Auto-Tuned" when in fact it isn't.

Not to be annoyingly pedantic—I try to keep it in check, I really do—but perhaps a lesson in some of the major methods of electronic voice alteration used in music might be in order. After the jump, some examples.

I know this sounds weird, but I have a soft spot for music that I hate. Not music that I merely don't like, but stuff that really offends me aesthetically. There's definitely a train-wreck element to the fascination, but I think it's mostly just that the music's very badness engages me—given the choice I'd rather listen to Brokencyde (who make me hate them in such a myriad of ways that it's actually sort of fascinating to contemplate them all) than the Dirty Projectors (who have yet to inspire any sort of emotional response in me deeper than mild confusion about why other people like them so much).

So it was as much of a blessing as it was a curse when I discovered the blog Stuff You Will Hate, a tribute to the one-way love-hate relationship between a self-described "old" hardcore and metal fan calling himself Sergeant D and, well, scene kids in general. Though he occasionally engages in a bit of Carles-ian faux-naive irony—like in the current entry, "Life's Big Questions: Are Hollister/Abercrombie Scene??"—he claims that anything he says he likes he actually likes, and he tends to stick up for the kids.

But man is that ever an appropriate name for a blog.

MetaFilter has long had a well-deserved reputation as one of the better things on the Internet, a "community weblog" where the community has a staggeringly broad range of interests and includes almost no trolls, which itself is kind of staggering as well. Here is an excellent example of the quality of the site's posts: a YouTube-assisted explanation of so-called "garage" dance music—it's different from garage rock—and its evolution from Larry Levan's disco-era remixes through deep house and 2-step all the way to dubstep, which is arguably the most interesting electronic music style of the moment and which I blame for the blown-outness of one of my woofers.

The trailer for Sam Taylor-Wood's upcoming John Lennon biopic Nowhere Man is out and it looks decent, zooming in on Lennon's teenage years and first stabs at music-making with the Quarrymen. But if there isn't a line on par with the "We're not a skiffle band. We're a rock 'n' roll band" line from Backbeat there isn't much chance of it becoming my favorite Beatles movie to quote to people who have no idea what I'm talking about.

Video after the jump:

I'm not upset that Rammstein have released a new album called Liebe Ist für Alle Da, which is German for Lube Is for Your Ass, which is of course English for Ugh. (Check to be sure your sense of humor is working before you correct my translation, please.) I'm not upset even that the superdeluxe edition includes actual lube, along with, y'know, six translucent pink dildos allegedly based on the band members' members. Some people think being transgressive is an end unto itself, and some people—among them tedious industrial-metal bands whose brains never left the 90s—still think that plastic wangs and handcuffs count as "transgressive." No, what upsets me is that, among the people who are coughing up more than $400 for the TMI version of the album, at least one must be planning to use the dildos for their intended purpose, and will in the process be fulfilling a decade-old fantasy about Rammstein running a train on them. You know it's true.

New Fever Ray video! Let's run down our Fever Ray Video Checklist:

Is it visually arresting? Check!

Is it jam-packed with impenetrable symbolism that offers tantalizing hints at its underlying meaning? Check!

Does it leave me deeply unsettled in a hard-to-define way that I find weirdly pleasurable? Double check!

Video after the jump.