Bidoun becomes an unlikely home for great contemporary music writing

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Before MySpace and its low-level stalking possibilities or Facebook and its gazillion time-sucking applications, there was Makeoutclub, a meeting site for hard-core, punk, goth and emo kids. Launched in 2000 by Gibby Miller, the website was bare bones -- click on "girls" or "boys" and read hundreds of profiles, which consisted of little more than a picture and a blank space ready made for a poem, a list of your favorite bands or maybe just a cribbed lyric representative of your sad little scotch-taped heart.

On Monday night, I trespassed in Griffith Park, ran from men with flashlights and retrieved a valuable envelope hidden inside a drainpipe.

No, I'm not a secret agent. Just a Nine Inch Nails fan.

Less willing to drive across the state -- or across town, for that matter -- to see your favorite performers because of skyrocketing costs at the gas pump?

We want to hear how the cost of fueling up may be cutting into your summer concert- and club-going. And if you’re a musician, tell us whether you’ve re-routed a tour so your band’s 1985 Ford Econoline van won’t have to make that 500-mile detour through Boise, Idaho, one more time.

Please e-mail your tales of fossil fuel-based woe to me at Randy.Lewis@latimes.com or leave them as comments.

--Randy Lewis

Photo of LoveLikeFire, one of the many young bands affected by steep gas prices, by Eric Risberg/Associated Press

The second annual Reggae Rising Music Festival is giving away $100 gas cards, in hopes of luring reggae fans to the festival grounds in remote Piercy, Calif., a town about 200 miles north of San Francisco. Performers include Sizzla, Cham, Junior Reid, Julian Marley and UB40. "Let reggae pick up your gasoline," its website explains. What a brilliant idea! Now, if only rock could pay for my hotel and hip-hop for my food.

Whether it's the Grammys, Oscars or Bravo's new entree into handing out coveted paperweights, awards culture is typically a slow-moving, conservative beast. Too often, the least controversial choice wins. Why do we keep watching? Well, there are all those pretty dresses and occasionally there's a Dickensian twist or flitter of progressive thinking.

From our pals over at the Technology blog:

If you are going up against a giant, it helps if you too are a giant. And scrappy.

That appears to be Amazon.com's strategy as its MP3 store takes on Apple's iTunes in digital music.

Today, the British alternative rock group Coldplay (pictured above), is releasing its new album, "Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends." Amazon is using the occasion to wave in more customers with some huge discounts.

Amazon said it would begin selling digital versions of past Coldplay albums for bargain-basement prices. As part of a weekly promotion called Daily Deal, the Coldplay album "X&Y" is today available for $1.99. On Wednesday, "A Rush of Blood to the Head" can be yours for $1.99. Both albums are currently $7.99 on iTunes. "Parachutes" is next up on Thursday for $1.99. On Friday, the "Brothers and Sisters" EP will cost you only 99 cents.

Since it launched in September, the Amazon MP3 store has trained its sights on Apple's iTunes store, which sells more music than any other U.S. retailer. Amazon has not released information about how much music it has sold.

Read the rest of Amazon cuts Coldplay album prices to bring in the crowds.

Has everybody in hip-hop gone vocoder crazy?

On the new single from G-Unit, "Rider (Part 2)," 50 Cent sings through the voice synthesizer for the chorus:

I told you boy, I’m a soldier boy

I got no choice but to be a rider

I approach you boy, with the toaster boy

From point blank range and then fire

Alas, Fiddy is hardly alone in his use of the instrument – which primitively yet evocatively augments the human voice, first developed in 1970 by electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog.

Blame ubiquitous R&B star T-Pain for the vocoder’s sudden vogue. The "rappa turnt sanga" (read: rapper turned singer) began using the voice synth in 2005, making waves with his singles "I’m Sprung" and "I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)."

And the instrument’s futuristic yet retro sound began to slouch toward a kind of cultural saturation point after he used it on collaborations with a laundry list of pop, rap and R&B luminaries -- Akon, Yung Joc, Mike Jones, Kanye West, Too Short, R. Kelly and Styles P among them.

Fast forward to this year’s slinky Snoop Dogg banger "Sensual Seduction." On the Shawty Redd-produced hit, Snoop’s voice is processed through the computerized talk box a la his 1970s funk hero Roger Troutman and is shown in the video singing into the vocoder’s telltale plastic tube.

And of course no discussion of the current vocoder craze would be complete without mention of Kanye’s Daft Punk collabo "Stronger," which features a sizable sample from the Parisian electronic dance duo’s vocoder-riffic 2001 single "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."

Robot rock indeed.

--Chris Lee

Photo by Jim Cooper / AP

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

A quick stroll through the rapper-blog gantlet reveals a few things we already knew: Kanye West has been keeping up with his Dwell subscription and Prodigy's latest prison blog for Vibe Magazine is just slathered in awesome. In this installment, we learn what really happened to the Sphinx! After the jump: ironic yuppie Dixie cups, cubist fish tanks and demonic owls.

From the time Run-DMC rapped about "My Adidas," sneaker culture has been more in step with hip-hop than rock. And with Nike's recent glow-in-the-dark Kanye West sneaker, the Air Yeezy, that connection is more prevalent than ever.

But rock fans need not feel left out, because today street fashion mecca Supreme over on Fairfax Avenue releases its limited-edition Vans Sk-8 HI tribute to punk gods Bad Brains.

Although it's just another addition to Vans' hokey "band shoes" category, we can only imagine how cool it would be to run around in these multicolored kicks, while paying homage to one of the greatest punk bands around. Of course you could also wait until May, when Converse drops its Kurt Cobain collection. But we hear people are already snickering at that marketing ploy. And you're on your own if you buy the Liberace kicks.

--Camilo Smith

Photo courtesy Supreme

A travel advisory for emo kids everywhere: You might want to rethink that spring break in Mexico this year. The reason? Marauding hordes of crusty punks and metal heads are apparently taking to streets and pummeling anyone in sight with choppy bangs and red eyeliner. For almost a month now, mobs as large as 800 have been organizing via social-networking sites and hunting down emo kids in Mexico City, Queretaro and reportedly even more cities around the country. Why this is suddenly happening in a nation whose people's affection for Morrissey is well-documented is unclear, and it's striking to see fans of the current radio-dominating strain of alt-rock music in America as victims of widespread assaults. Daniel Hernandez is doing some great reporting at LA Weekly on this story, and he cites this anti-emo rant from Televisa host Kristoff as the flashpoint (with Kristoff's choicest words coming at the :42 second mark). Mexican newspaper La Jornada goes as far as to say it's a result of a social schism after the 2006 election tensions. There seems to be a nasty undercurrent of homophobia here, and Mexican gay-rights groups are organizing marches and meetings with local governments to quell the violence. Soundboard would never condone taste-based violence of any sort. That said, since when do Mexican riot police call Hare Krishnas for backup?-- August Brown

Update: For a far more bemused take on the bruised and battered emos, read Ken Ellingwood from LA Times here.

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

The relaunch of Makeoutclub.com

Before MySpace and its low-level stalking possibilities or Facebook and its gazillion time-sucking applications, there was Makeoutclub, a meeting site for hard-core, punk, goth and emo kids. Launched in 2000 by Gibby Miller, the website was bare bones -- click on "girls" or "boys" and read hundreds of profiles, which consisted of little more than a picture and a blank space ready made for a poem, a list of your favorite bands or maybe just a cribbed lyric representative of your sad little scotch-taped heart.

On Monday night, I trespassed in Griffith Park, ran from men with flashlights and retrieved a valuable envelope hidden inside a drainpipe.

No, I'm not a secret agent. Just a Nine Inch Nails fan.

Less willing to drive across the state -- or across town, for that matter -- to see your favorite performers because of skyrocketing costs at the gas pump?

We want to hear how the cost of fueling up may be cutting into your summer concert- and club-going. And if you’re a musician, tell us whether you’ve re-routed a tour so your band’s 1985 Ford Econoline van won’t have to make that 500-mile detour through Boise, Idaho, one more time.

Please e-mail your tales of fossil fuel-based woe to me at Randy.Lewis@latimes.com or leave them as comments.

--Randy Lewis

Photo of LoveLikeFire, one of the many young bands affected by steep gas prices, by Eric Risberg/Associated Press

The second annual Reggae Rising Music Festival is giving away $100 gas cards, in hopes of luring reggae fans to the festival grounds in remote Piercy, Calif., a town about 200 miles north of San Francisco. Performers include Sizzla, Cham, Junior Reid, Julian Marley and UB40. "Let reggae pick up your gasoline," its website explains. What a brilliant idea! Now, if only rock could pay for my hotel and hip-hop for my food.

Whether it's the Grammys, Oscars or Bravo's new entree into handing out coveted paperweights, awards culture is typically a slow-moving, conservative beast. Too often, the least controversial choice wins. Why do we keep watching? Well, there are all those pretty dresses and occasionally there's a Dickensian twist or flitter of progressive thinking.

From our pals over at the Technology blog:

If you are going up against a giant, it helps if you too are a giant. And scrappy.

That appears to be Amazon.com's strategy as its MP3 store takes on Apple's iTunes in digital music.

Today, the British alternative rock group Coldplay (pictured above), is releasing its new album, "Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends." Amazon is using the occasion to wave in more customers with some huge discounts.

Amazon said it would begin selling digital versions of past Coldplay albums for bargain-basement prices. As part of a weekly promotion called Daily Deal, the Coldplay album "X&Y" is today available for $1.99. On Wednesday, "A Rush of Blood to the Head" can be yours for $1.99. Both albums are currently $7.99 on iTunes. "Parachutes" is next up on Thursday for $1.99. On Friday, the "Brothers and Sisters" EP will cost you only 99 cents.

Since it launched in September, the Amazon MP3 store has trained its sights on Apple's iTunes store, which sells more music than any other U.S. retailer. Amazon has not released information about how much music it has sold.

Read the rest of Amazon cuts Coldplay album prices to bring in the crowds.

Has everybody in hip-hop gone vocoder crazy?

On the new single from G-Unit, "Rider (Part 2)," 50 Cent sings through the voice synthesizer for the chorus:

I told you boy, I’m a soldier boy

I got no choice but to be a rider

I approach you boy, with the toaster boy

From point blank range and then fire

Alas, Fiddy is hardly alone in his use of the instrument – which primitively yet evocatively augments the human voice, first developed in 1970 by electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog.

Blame ubiquitous R&B star T-Pain for the vocoder’s sudden vogue. The "rappa turnt sanga" (read: rapper turned singer) began using the voice synth in 2005, making waves with his singles "I’m Sprung" and "I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)."

And the instrument’s futuristic yet retro sound began to slouch toward a kind of cultural saturation point after he used it on collaborations with a laundry list of pop, rap and R&B luminaries -- Akon, Yung Joc, Mike Jones, Kanye West, Too Short, R. Kelly and Styles P among them.

Fast forward to this year’s slinky Snoop Dogg banger "Sensual Seduction." On the Shawty Redd-produced hit, Snoop’s voice is processed through the computerized talk box a la his 1970s funk hero Roger Troutman and is shown in the video singing into the vocoder’s telltale plastic tube.

And of course no discussion of the current vocoder craze would be complete without mention of Kanye’s Daft Punk collabo "Stronger," which features a sizable sample from the Parisian electronic dance duo’s vocoder-riffic 2001 single "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."

Robot rock indeed.

--Chris Lee

Photo by Jim Cooper / AP

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

A quick stroll through the rapper-blog gantlet reveals a few things we already knew: Kanye West has been keeping up with his Dwell subscription and Prodigy's latest prison blog for Vibe Magazine is just slathered in awesome. In this installment, we learn what really happened to the Sphinx! After the jump: ironic yuppie Dixie cups, cubist fish tanks and demonic owls.

From the time Run-DMC rapped about "My Adidas," sneaker culture has been more in step with hip-hop than rock. And with Nike's recent glow-in-the-dark Kanye West sneaker, the Air Yeezy, that connection is more prevalent than ever.

But rock fans need not feel left out, because today street fashion mecca Supreme over on Fairfax Avenue releases its limited-edition Vans Sk-8 HI tribute to punk gods Bad Brains.

Although it's just another addition to Vans' hokey "band shoes" category, we can only imagine how cool it would be to run around in these multicolored kicks, while paying homage to one of the greatest punk bands around. Of course you could also wait until May, when Converse drops its Kurt Cobain collection. But we hear people are already snickering at that marketing ploy. And you're on your own if you buy the Liberace kicks.

--Camilo Smith

Photo courtesy Supreme

A travel advisory for emo kids everywhere: You might want to rethink that spring break in Mexico this year. The reason? Marauding hordes of crusty punks and metal heads are apparently taking to streets and pummeling anyone in sight with choppy bangs and red eyeliner. For almost a month now, mobs as large as 800 have been organizing via social-networking sites and hunting down emo kids in Mexico City, Queretaro and reportedly even more cities around the country. Why this is suddenly happening in a nation whose people's affection for Morrissey is well-documented is unclear, and it's striking to see fans of the current radio-dominating strain of alt-rock music in America as victims of widespread assaults. Daniel Hernandez is doing some great reporting at LA Weekly on this story, and he cites this anti-emo rant from Televisa host Kristoff as the flashpoint (with Kristoff's choicest words coming at the :42 second mark). Mexican newspaper La Jornada goes as far as to say it's a result of a social schism after the 2006 election tensions. There seems to be a nasty undercurrent of homophobia here, and Mexican gay-rights groups are organizing marches and meetings with local governments to quell the violence. Soundboard would never condone taste-based violence of any sort. That said, since when do Mexican riot police call Hare Krishnas for backup?-- August Brown

Update: For a far more bemused take on the bruised and battered emos, read Ken Ellingwood from LA Times here.

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

Nine Inch Nails sends fans to downward spiraled drainpipe

On Monday night, I trespassed in Griffith Park, ran from men with flashlights and retrieved a valuable envelope hidden inside a drainpipe.

No, I'm not a secret agent. Just a Nine Inch Nails fan.

Less willing to drive across the state -- or across town, for that matter -- to see your favorite performers because of skyrocketing costs at the gas pump?

We want to hear how the cost of fueling up may be cutting into your summer concert- and club-going. And if you’re a musician, tell us whether you’ve re-routed a tour so your band’s 1985 Ford Econoline van won’t have to make that 500-mile detour through Boise, Idaho, one more time.

Please e-mail your tales of fossil fuel-based woe to me at Randy.Lewis@latimes.com or leave them as comments.

--Randy Lewis

Photo of LoveLikeFire, one of the many young bands affected by steep gas prices, by Eric Risberg/Associated Press

The second annual Reggae Rising Music Festival is giving away $100 gas cards, in hopes of luring reggae fans to the festival grounds in remote Piercy, Calif., a town about 200 miles north of San Francisco. Performers include Sizzla, Cham, Junior Reid, Julian Marley and UB40. "Let reggae pick up your gasoline," its website explains. What a brilliant idea! Now, if only rock could pay for my hotel and hip-hop for my food.

Whether it's the Grammys, Oscars or Bravo's new entree into handing out coveted paperweights, awards culture is typically a slow-moving, conservative beast. Too often, the least controversial choice wins. Why do we keep watching? Well, there are all those pretty dresses and occasionally there's a Dickensian twist or flitter of progressive thinking.

From our pals over at the Technology blog:

If you are going up against a giant, it helps if you too are a giant. And scrappy.

That appears to be Amazon.com's strategy as its MP3 store takes on Apple's iTunes in digital music.

Today, the British alternative rock group Coldplay (pictured above), is releasing its new album, "Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends." Amazon is using the occasion to wave in more customers with some huge discounts.

Amazon said it would begin selling digital versions of past Coldplay albums for bargain-basement prices. As part of a weekly promotion called Daily Deal, the Coldplay album "X&Y" is today available for $1.99. On Wednesday, "A Rush of Blood to the Head" can be yours for $1.99. Both albums are currently $7.99 on iTunes. "Parachutes" is next up on Thursday for $1.99. On Friday, the "Brothers and Sisters" EP will cost you only 99 cents.

Since it launched in September, the Amazon MP3 store has trained its sights on Apple's iTunes store, which sells more music than any other U.S. retailer. Amazon has not released information about how much music it has sold.

Read the rest of Amazon cuts Coldplay album prices to bring in the crowds.

Has everybody in hip-hop gone vocoder crazy?

On the new single from G-Unit, "Rider (Part 2)," 50 Cent sings through the voice synthesizer for the chorus:

I told you boy, I’m a soldier boy

I got no choice but to be a rider

I approach you boy, with the toaster boy

From point blank range and then fire

Alas, Fiddy is hardly alone in his use of the instrument – which primitively yet evocatively augments the human voice, first developed in 1970 by electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog.

Blame ubiquitous R&B star T-Pain for the vocoder’s sudden vogue. The "rappa turnt sanga" (read: rapper turned singer) began using the voice synth in 2005, making waves with his singles "I’m Sprung" and "I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)."

And the instrument’s futuristic yet retro sound began to slouch toward a kind of cultural saturation point after he used it on collaborations with a laundry list of pop, rap and R&B luminaries -- Akon, Yung Joc, Mike Jones, Kanye West, Too Short, R. Kelly and Styles P among them.

Fast forward to this year’s slinky Snoop Dogg banger "Sensual Seduction." On the Shawty Redd-produced hit, Snoop’s voice is processed through the computerized talk box a la his 1970s funk hero Roger Troutman and is shown in the video singing into the vocoder’s telltale plastic tube.

And of course no discussion of the current vocoder craze would be complete without mention of Kanye’s Daft Punk collabo "Stronger," which features a sizable sample from the Parisian electronic dance duo’s vocoder-riffic 2001 single "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."

Robot rock indeed.

--Chris Lee

Photo by Jim Cooper / AP

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

A quick stroll through the rapper-blog gantlet reveals a few things we already knew: Kanye West has been keeping up with his Dwell subscription and Prodigy's latest prison blog for Vibe Magazine is just slathered in awesome. In this installment, we learn what really happened to the Sphinx! After the jump: ironic yuppie Dixie cups, cubist fish tanks and demonic owls.

From the time Run-DMC rapped about "My Adidas," sneaker culture has been more in step with hip-hop than rock. And with Nike's recent glow-in-the-dark Kanye West sneaker, the Air Yeezy, that connection is more prevalent than ever.

But rock fans need not feel left out, because today street fashion mecca Supreme over on Fairfax Avenue releases its limited-edition Vans Sk-8 HI tribute to punk gods Bad Brains.

Although it's just another addition to Vans' hokey "band shoes" category, we can only imagine how cool it would be to run around in these multicolored kicks, while paying homage to one of the greatest punk bands around. Of course you could also wait until May, when Converse drops its Kurt Cobain collection. But we hear people are already snickering at that marketing ploy. And you're on your own if you buy the Liberace kicks.

--Camilo Smith

Photo courtesy Supreme

A travel advisory for emo kids everywhere: You might want to rethink that spring break in Mexico this year. The reason? Marauding hordes of crusty punks and metal heads are apparently taking to streets and pummeling anyone in sight with choppy bangs and red eyeliner. For almost a month now, mobs as large as 800 have been organizing via social-networking sites and hunting down emo kids in Mexico City, Queretaro and reportedly even more cities around the country. Why this is suddenly happening in a nation whose people's affection for Morrissey is well-documented is unclear, and it's striking to see fans of the current radio-dominating strain of alt-rock music in America as victims of widespread assaults. Daniel Hernandez is doing some great reporting at LA Weekly on this story, and he cites this anti-emo rant from Televisa host Kristoff as the flashpoint (with Kristoff's choicest words coming at the :42 second mark). Mexican newspaper La Jornada goes as far as to say it's a result of a social schism after the 2006 election tensions. There seems to be a nasty undercurrent of homophobia here, and Mexican gay-rights groups are organizing marches and meetings with local governments to quell the violence. Soundboard would never condone taste-based violence of any sort. That said, since when do Mexican riot police call Hare Krishnas for backup?-- August Brown

Update: For a far more bemused take on the bruised and battered emos, read Ken Ellingwood from LA Times here.

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

Gas prices keeping you home?

Less willing to drive across the state -- or across town, for that matter -- to see your favorite performers because of skyrocketing costs at the gas pump?

We want to hear how the cost of fueling up may be cutting into your summer concert- and club-going. And if you’re a musician, tell us whether you’ve re-routed a tour so your band’s 1985 Ford Econoline van won’t have to make that 500-mile detour through Boise, Idaho, one more time.

Please e-mail your tales of fossil fuel-based woe to me at Randy.Lewis@latimes.com or leave them as comments.

--Randy Lewis

Photo of LoveLikeFire, one of the many young bands affected by steep gas prices, by Eric Risberg/Associated Press

The second annual Reggae Rising Music Festival is giving away $100 gas cards, in hopes of luring reggae fans to the festival grounds in remote Piercy, Calif., a town about 200 miles north of San Francisco. Performers include Sizzla, Cham, Junior Reid, Julian Marley and UB40. "Let reggae pick up your gasoline," its website explains. What a brilliant idea! Now, if only rock could pay for my hotel and hip-hop for my food.

Whether it's the Grammys, Oscars or Bravo's new entree into handing out coveted paperweights, awards culture is typically a slow-moving, conservative beast. Too often, the least controversial choice wins. Why do we keep watching? Well, there are all those pretty dresses and occasionally there's a Dickensian twist or flitter of progressive thinking.

From our pals over at the Technology blog:

If you are going up against a giant, it helps if you too are a giant. And scrappy.

That appears to be Amazon.com's strategy as its MP3 store takes on Apple's iTunes in digital music.

Today, the British alternative rock group Coldplay (pictured above), is releasing its new album, "Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends." Amazon is using the occasion to wave in more customers with some huge discounts.

Amazon said it would begin selling digital versions of past Coldplay albums for bargain-basement prices. As part of a weekly promotion called Daily Deal, the Coldplay album "X&Y" is today available for $1.99. On Wednesday, "A Rush of Blood to the Head" can be yours for $1.99. Both albums are currently $7.99 on iTunes. "Parachutes" is next up on Thursday for $1.99. On Friday, the "Brothers and Sisters" EP will cost you only 99 cents.

Since it launched in September, the Amazon MP3 store has trained its sights on Apple's iTunes store, which sells more music than any other U.S. retailer. Amazon has not released information about how much music it has sold.

Read the rest of Amazon cuts Coldplay album prices to bring in the crowds.

Has everybody in hip-hop gone vocoder crazy?

On the new single from G-Unit, "Rider (Part 2)," 50 Cent sings through the voice synthesizer for the chorus:

I told you boy, I’m a soldier boy

I got no choice but to be a rider

I approach you boy, with the toaster boy

From point blank range and then fire

Alas, Fiddy is hardly alone in his use of the instrument – which primitively yet evocatively augments the human voice, first developed in 1970 by electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog.

Blame ubiquitous R&B star T-Pain for the vocoder’s sudden vogue. The "rappa turnt sanga" (read: rapper turned singer) began using the voice synth in 2005, making waves with his singles "I’m Sprung" and "I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)."

And the instrument’s futuristic yet retro sound began to slouch toward a kind of cultural saturation point after he used it on collaborations with a laundry list of pop, rap and R&B luminaries -- Akon, Yung Joc, Mike Jones, Kanye West, Too Short, R. Kelly and Styles P among them.

Fast forward to this year’s slinky Snoop Dogg banger "Sensual Seduction." On the Shawty Redd-produced hit, Snoop’s voice is processed through the computerized talk box a la his 1970s funk hero Roger Troutman and is shown in the video singing into the vocoder’s telltale plastic tube.

And of course no discussion of the current vocoder craze would be complete without mention of Kanye’s Daft Punk collabo "Stronger," which features a sizable sample from the Parisian electronic dance duo’s vocoder-riffic 2001 single "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."

Robot rock indeed.

--Chris Lee

Photo by Jim Cooper / AP

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

A quick stroll through the rapper-blog gantlet reveals a few things we already knew: Kanye West has been keeping up with his Dwell subscription and Prodigy's latest prison blog for Vibe Magazine is just slathered in awesome. In this installment, we learn what really happened to the Sphinx! After the jump: ironic yuppie Dixie cups, cubist fish tanks and demonic owls.

From the time Run-DMC rapped about "My Adidas," sneaker culture has been more in step with hip-hop than rock. And with Nike's recent glow-in-the-dark Kanye West sneaker, the Air Yeezy, that connection is more prevalent than ever.

But rock fans need not feel left out, because today street fashion mecca Supreme over on Fairfax Avenue releases its limited-edition Vans Sk-8 HI tribute to punk gods Bad Brains.

Although it's just another addition to Vans' hokey "band shoes" category, we can only imagine how cool it would be to run around in these multicolored kicks, while paying homage to one of the greatest punk bands around. Of course you could also wait until May, when Converse drops its Kurt Cobain collection. But we hear people are already snickering at that marketing ploy. And you're on your own if you buy the Liberace kicks.

--Camilo Smith

Photo courtesy Supreme

A travel advisory for emo kids everywhere: You might want to rethink that spring break in Mexico this year. The reason? Marauding hordes of crusty punks and metal heads are apparently taking to streets and pummeling anyone in sight with choppy bangs and red eyeliner. For almost a month now, mobs as large as 800 have been organizing via social-networking sites and hunting down emo kids in Mexico City, Queretaro and reportedly even more cities around the country. Why this is suddenly happening in a nation whose people's affection for Morrissey is well-documented is unclear, and it's striking to see fans of the current radio-dominating strain of alt-rock music in America as victims of widespread assaults. Daniel Hernandez is doing some great reporting at LA Weekly on this story, and he cites this anti-emo rant from Televisa host Kristoff as the flashpoint (with Kristoff's choicest words coming at the :42 second mark). Mexican newspaper La Jornada goes as far as to say it's a result of a social schism after the 2006 election tensions. There seems to be a nasty undercurrent of homophobia here, and Mexican gay-rights groups are organizing marches and meetings with local governments to quell the violence. Soundboard would never condone taste-based violence of any sort. That said, since when do Mexican riot police call Hare Krishnas for backup?-- August Brown

Update: For a far more bemused take on the bruised and battered emos, read Ken Ellingwood from LA Times here.

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

Gas prices, Jamaican me crazy!

The second annual Reggae Rising Music Festival is giving away $100 gas cards, in hopes of luring reggae fans to the festival grounds in remote Piercy, Calif., a town about 200 miles north of San Francisco. Performers include Sizzla, Cham, Junior Reid, Julian Marley and UB40. "Let reggae pick up your gasoline," its website explains. What a brilliant idea! Now, if only rock could pay for my hotel and hip-hop for my food.

Whether it's the Grammys, Oscars or Bravo's new entree into handing out coveted paperweights, awards culture is typically a slow-moving, conservative beast. Too often, the least controversial choice wins. Why do we keep watching? Well, there are all those pretty dresses and occasionally there's a Dickensian twist or flitter of progressive thinking.

From our pals over at the Technology blog:

If you are going up against a giant, it helps if you too are a giant. And scrappy.

That appears to be Amazon.com's strategy as its MP3 store takes on Apple's iTunes in digital music.

Today, the British alternative rock group Coldplay (pictured above), is releasing its new album, "Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends." Amazon is using the occasion to wave in more customers with some huge discounts.

Amazon said it would begin selling digital versions of past Coldplay albums for bargain-basement prices. As part of a weekly promotion called Daily Deal, the Coldplay album "X&Y" is today available for $1.99. On Wednesday, "A Rush of Blood to the Head" can be yours for $1.99. Both albums are currently $7.99 on iTunes. "Parachutes" is next up on Thursday for $1.99. On Friday, the "Brothers and Sisters" EP will cost you only 99 cents.

Since it launched in September, the Amazon MP3 store has trained its sights on Apple's iTunes store, which sells more music than any other U.S. retailer. Amazon has not released information about how much music it has sold.

Read the rest of Amazon cuts Coldplay album prices to bring in the crowds.

Has everybody in hip-hop gone vocoder crazy?

On the new single from G-Unit, "Rider (Part 2)," 50 Cent sings through the voice synthesizer for the chorus:

I told you boy, I’m a soldier boy

I got no choice but to be a rider

I approach you boy, with the toaster boy

From point blank range and then fire

Alas, Fiddy is hardly alone in his use of the instrument – which primitively yet evocatively augments the human voice, first developed in 1970 by electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog.

Blame ubiquitous R&B star T-Pain for the vocoder’s sudden vogue. The "rappa turnt sanga" (read: rapper turned singer) began using the voice synth in 2005, making waves with his singles "I’m Sprung" and "I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)."

And the instrument’s futuristic yet retro sound began to slouch toward a kind of cultural saturation point after he used it on collaborations with a laundry list of pop, rap and R&B luminaries -- Akon, Yung Joc, Mike Jones, Kanye West, Too Short, R. Kelly and Styles P among them.

Fast forward to this year’s slinky Snoop Dogg banger "Sensual Seduction." On the Shawty Redd-produced hit, Snoop’s voice is processed through the computerized talk box a la his 1970s funk hero Roger Troutman and is shown in the video singing into the vocoder’s telltale plastic tube.

And of course no discussion of the current vocoder craze would be complete without mention of Kanye’s Daft Punk collabo "Stronger," which features a sizable sample from the Parisian electronic dance duo’s vocoder-riffic 2001 single "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."

Robot rock indeed.

--Chris Lee

Photo by Jim Cooper / AP

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

A quick stroll through the rapper-blog gantlet reveals a few things we already knew: Kanye West has been keeping up with his Dwell subscription and Prodigy's latest prison blog for Vibe Magazine is just slathered in awesome. In this installment, we learn what really happened to the Sphinx! After the jump: ironic yuppie Dixie cups, cubist fish tanks and demonic owls.

From the time Run-DMC rapped about "My Adidas," sneaker culture has been more in step with hip-hop than rock. And with Nike's recent glow-in-the-dark Kanye West sneaker, the Air Yeezy, that connection is more prevalent than ever.

But rock fans need not feel left out, because today street fashion mecca Supreme over on Fairfax Avenue releases its limited-edition Vans Sk-8 HI tribute to punk gods Bad Brains.

Although it's just another addition to Vans' hokey "band shoes" category, we can only imagine how cool it would be to run around in these multicolored kicks, while paying homage to one of the greatest punk bands around. Of course you could also wait until May, when Converse drops its Kurt Cobain collection. But we hear people are already snickering at that marketing ploy. And you're on your own if you buy the Liberace kicks.

--Camilo Smith

Photo courtesy Supreme

A travel advisory for emo kids everywhere: You might want to rethink that spring break in Mexico this year. The reason? Marauding hordes of crusty punks and metal heads are apparently taking to streets and pummeling anyone in sight with choppy bangs and red eyeliner. For almost a month now, mobs as large as 800 have been organizing via social-networking sites and hunting down emo kids in Mexico City, Queretaro and reportedly even more cities around the country. Why this is suddenly happening in a nation whose people's affection for Morrissey is well-documented is unclear, and it's striking to see fans of the current radio-dominating strain of alt-rock music in America as victims of widespread assaults. Daniel Hernandez is doing some great reporting at LA Weekly on this story, and he cites this anti-emo rant from Televisa host Kristoff as the flashpoint (with Kristoff's choicest words coming at the :42 second mark). Mexican newspaper La Jornada goes as far as to say it's a result of a social schism after the 2006 election tensions. There seems to be a nasty undercurrent of homophobia here, and Mexican gay-rights groups are organizing marches and meetings with local governments to quell the violence. Soundboard would never condone taste-based violence of any sort. That said, since when do Mexican riot police call Hare Krishnas for backup?-- August Brown

Update: For a far more bemused take on the bruised and battered emos, read Ken Ellingwood from LA Times here.

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

Emmys give knuckle bump to will.i.am; more videos on the way

Whether it's the Grammys, Oscars or Bravo's new entree into handing out coveted paperweights, awards culture is typically a slow-moving, conservative beast. Too often, the least controversial choice wins. Why do we keep watching? Well, there are all those pretty dresses and occasionally there's a Dickensian twist or flitter of progressive thinking.

From our pals over at the Technology blog:

If you are going up against a giant, it helps if you too are a giant. And scrappy.

That appears to be Amazon.com's strategy as its MP3 store takes on Apple's iTunes in digital music.

Today, the British alternative rock group Coldplay (pictured above), is releasing its new album, "Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends." Amazon is using the occasion to wave in more customers with some huge discounts.

Amazon said it would begin selling digital versions of past Coldplay albums for bargain-basement prices. As part of a weekly promotion called Daily Deal, the Coldplay album "X&Y" is today available for $1.99. On Wednesday, "A Rush of Blood to the Head" can be yours for $1.99. Both albums are currently $7.99 on iTunes. "Parachutes" is next up on Thursday for $1.99. On Friday, the "Brothers and Sisters" EP will cost you only 99 cents.

Since it launched in September, the Amazon MP3 store has trained its sights on Apple's iTunes store, which sells more music than any other U.S. retailer. Amazon has not released information about how much music it has sold.

Read the rest of Amazon cuts Coldplay album prices to bring in the crowds.

Has everybody in hip-hop gone vocoder crazy?

On the new single from G-Unit, "Rider (Part 2)," 50 Cent sings through the voice synthesizer for the chorus:

I told you boy, I’m a soldier boy

I got no choice but to be a rider

I approach you boy, with the toaster boy

From point blank range and then fire

Alas, Fiddy is hardly alone in his use of the instrument – which primitively yet evocatively augments the human voice, first developed in 1970 by electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog.

Blame ubiquitous R&B star T-Pain for the vocoder’s sudden vogue. The "rappa turnt sanga" (read: rapper turned singer) began using the voice synth in 2005, making waves with his singles "I’m Sprung" and "I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)."

And the instrument’s futuristic yet retro sound began to slouch toward a kind of cultural saturation point after he used it on collaborations with a laundry list of pop, rap and R&B luminaries -- Akon, Yung Joc, Mike Jones, Kanye West, Too Short, R. Kelly and Styles P among them.

Fast forward to this year’s slinky Snoop Dogg banger "Sensual Seduction." On the Shawty Redd-produced hit, Snoop’s voice is processed through the computerized talk box a la his 1970s funk hero Roger Troutman and is shown in the video singing into the vocoder’s telltale plastic tube.

And of course no discussion of the current vocoder craze would be complete without mention of Kanye’s Daft Punk collabo "Stronger," which features a sizable sample from the Parisian electronic dance duo’s vocoder-riffic 2001 single "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."

Robot rock indeed.

--Chris Lee

Photo by Jim Cooper / AP

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

A quick stroll through the rapper-blog gantlet reveals a few things we already knew: Kanye West has been keeping up with his Dwell subscription and Prodigy's latest prison blog for Vibe Magazine is just slathered in awesome. In this installment, we learn what really happened to the Sphinx! After the jump: ironic yuppie Dixie cups, cubist fish tanks and demonic owls.

From the time Run-DMC rapped about "My Adidas," sneaker culture has been more in step with hip-hop than rock. And with Nike's recent glow-in-the-dark Kanye West sneaker, the Air Yeezy, that connection is more prevalent than ever.

But rock fans need not feel left out, because today street fashion mecca Supreme over on Fairfax Avenue releases its limited-edition Vans Sk-8 HI tribute to punk gods Bad Brains.

Although it's just another addition to Vans' hokey "band shoes" category, we can only imagine how cool it would be to run around in these multicolored kicks, while paying homage to one of the greatest punk bands around. Of course you could also wait until May, when Converse drops its Kurt Cobain collection. But we hear people are already snickering at that marketing ploy. And you're on your own if you buy the Liberace kicks.

--Camilo Smith

Photo courtesy Supreme

A travel advisory for emo kids everywhere: You might want to rethink that spring break in Mexico this year. The reason? Marauding hordes of crusty punks and metal heads are apparently taking to streets and pummeling anyone in sight with choppy bangs and red eyeliner. For almost a month now, mobs as large as 800 have been organizing via social-networking sites and hunting down emo kids in Mexico City, Queretaro and reportedly even more cities around the country. Why this is suddenly happening in a nation whose people's affection for Morrissey is well-documented is unclear, and it's striking to see fans of the current radio-dominating strain of alt-rock music in America as victims of widespread assaults. Daniel Hernandez is doing some great reporting at LA Weekly on this story, and he cites this anti-emo rant from Televisa host Kristoff as the flashpoint (with Kristoff's choicest words coming at the :42 second mark). Mexican newspaper La Jornada goes as far as to say it's a result of a social schism after the 2006 election tensions. There seems to be a nasty undercurrent of homophobia here, and Mexican gay-rights groups are organizing marches and meetings with local governments to quell the violence. Soundboard would never condone taste-based violence of any sort. That said, since when do Mexican riot police call Hare Krishnas for backup?-- August Brown

Update: For a far more bemused take on the bruised and battered emos, read Ken Ellingwood from LA Times here.

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

Amazon cuts Coldplay album prices to bring in the crowds

From our pals over at the Technology blog:

If you are going up against a giant, it helps if you too are a giant. And scrappy.

That appears to be Amazon.com's strategy as its MP3 store takes on Apple's iTunes in digital music.

Today, the British alternative rock group Coldplay (pictured above), is releasing its new album, "Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends." Amazon is using the occasion to wave in more customers with some huge discounts.

Amazon said it would begin selling digital versions of past Coldplay albums for bargain-basement prices. As part of a weekly promotion called Daily Deal, the Coldplay album "X&Y" is today available for $1.99. On Wednesday, "A Rush of Blood to the Head" can be yours for $1.99. Both albums are currently $7.99 on iTunes. "Parachutes" is next up on Thursday for $1.99. On Friday, the "Brothers and Sisters" EP will cost you only 99 cents.

Since it launched in September, the Amazon MP3 store has trained its sights on Apple's iTunes store, which sells more music than any other U.S. retailer. Amazon has not released information about how much music it has sold.

Read the rest of Amazon cuts Coldplay album prices to bring in the crowds.

Has everybody in hip-hop gone vocoder crazy?

On the new single from G-Unit, "Rider (Part 2)," 50 Cent sings through the voice synthesizer for the chorus:

I told you boy, I’m a soldier boy

I got no choice but to be a rider

I approach you boy, with the toaster boy

From point blank range and then fire

Alas, Fiddy is hardly alone in his use of the instrument – which primitively yet evocatively augments the human voice, first developed in 1970 by electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog.

Blame ubiquitous R&B star T-Pain for the vocoder’s sudden vogue. The "rappa turnt sanga" (read: rapper turned singer) began using the voice synth in 2005, making waves with his singles "I’m Sprung" and "I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)."

And the instrument’s futuristic yet retro sound began to slouch toward a kind of cultural saturation point after he used it on collaborations with a laundry list of pop, rap and R&B luminaries -- Akon, Yung Joc, Mike Jones, Kanye West, Too Short, R. Kelly and Styles P among them.

Fast forward to this year’s slinky Snoop Dogg banger "Sensual Seduction." On the Shawty Redd-produced hit, Snoop’s voice is processed through the computerized talk box a la his 1970s funk hero Roger Troutman and is shown in the video singing into the vocoder’s telltale plastic tube.

And of course no discussion of the current vocoder craze would be complete without mention of Kanye’s Daft Punk collabo "Stronger," which features a sizable sample from the Parisian electronic dance duo’s vocoder-riffic 2001 single "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."

Robot rock indeed.

--Chris Lee

Photo by Jim Cooper / AP

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

A quick stroll through the rapper-blog gantlet reveals a few things we already knew: Kanye West has been keeping up with his Dwell subscription and Prodigy's latest prison blog for Vibe Magazine is just slathered in awesome. In this installment, we learn what really happened to the Sphinx! After the jump: ironic yuppie Dixie cups, cubist fish tanks and demonic owls.

From the time Run-DMC rapped about "My Adidas," sneaker culture has been more in step with hip-hop than rock. And with Nike's recent glow-in-the-dark Kanye West sneaker, the Air Yeezy, that connection is more prevalent than ever.

But rock fans need not feel left out, because today street fashion mecca Supreme over on Fairfax Avenue releases its limited-edition Vans Sk-8 HI tribute to punk gods Bad Brains.

Although it's just another addition to Vans' hokey "band shoes" category, we can only imagine how cool it would be to run around in these multicolored kicks, while paying homage to one of the greatest punk bands around. Of course you could also wait until May, when Converse drops its Kurt Cobain collection. But we hear people are already snickering at that marketing ploy. And you're on your own if you buy the Liberace kicks.

--Camilo Smith

Photo courtesy Supreme

A travel advisory for emo kids everywhere: You might want to rethink that spring break in Mexico this year. The reason? Marauding hordes of crusty punks and metal heads are apparently taking to streets and pummeling anyone in sight with choppy bangs and red eyeliner. For almost a month now, mobs as large as 800 have been organizing via social-networking sites and hunting down emo kids in Mexico City, Queretaro and reportedly even more cities around the country. Why this is suddenly happening in a nation whose people's affection for Morrissey is well-documented is unclear, and it's striking to see fans of the current radio-dominating strain of alt-rock music in America as victims of widespread assaults. Daniel Hernandez is doing some great reporting at LA Weekly on this story, and he cites this anti-emo rant from Televisa host Kristoff as the flashpoint (with Kristoff's choicest words coming at the :42 second mark). Mexican newspaper La Jornada goes as far as to say it's a result of a social schism after the 2006 election tensions. There seems to be a nasty undercurrent of homophobia here, and Mexican gay-rights groups are organizing marches and meetings with local governments to quell the violence. Soundboard would never condone taste-based violence of any sort. That said, since when do Mexican riot police call Hare Krishnas for backup?-- August Brown

Update: For a far more bemused take on the bruised and battered emos, read Ken Ellingwood from LA Times here.

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

Fiddy gets his vocoder on

Has everybody in hip-hop gone vocoder crazy?

On the new single from G-Unit, "Rider (Part 2)," 50 Cent sings through the voice synthesizer for the chorus:

I told you boy, I’m a soldier boy

I got no choice but to be a rider

I approach you boy, with the toaster boy

From point blank range and then fire

Alas, Fiddy is hardly alone in his use of the instrument – which primitively yet evocatively augments the human voice, first developed in 1970 by electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog.

Blame ubiquitous R&B star T-Pain for the vocoder’s sudden vogue. The "rappa turnt sanga" (read: rapper turned singer) began using the voice synth in 2005, making waves with his singles "I’m Sprung" and "I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)."

And the instrument’s futuristic yet retro sound began to slouch toward a kind of cultural saturation point after he used it on collaborations with a laundry list of pop, rap and R&B luminaries -- Akon, Yung Joc, Mike Jones, Kanye West, Too Short, R. Kelly and Styles P among them.

Fast forward to this year’s slinky Snoop Dogg banger "Sensual Seduction." On the Shawty Redd-produced hit, Snoop’s voice is processed through the computerized talk box a la his 1970s funk hero Roger Troutman and is shown in the video singing into the vocoder’s telltale plastic tube.

And of course no discussion of the current vocoder craze would be complete without mention of Kanye’s Daft Punk collabo "Stronger," which features a sizable sample from the Parisian electronic dance duo’s vocoder-riffic 2001 single "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."

Robot rock indeed.

--Chris Lee

Photo by Jim Cooper / AP

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

A quick stroll through the rapper-blog gantlet reveals a few things we already knew: Kanye West has been keeping up with his Dwell subscription and Prodigy's latest prison blog for Vibe Magazine is just slathered in awesome. In this installment, we learn what really happened to the Sphinx! After the jump: ironic yuppie Dixie cups, cubist fish tanks and demonic owls.

From the time Run-DMC rapped about "My Adidas," sneaker culture has been more in step with hip-hop than rock. And with Nike's recent glow-in-the-dark Kanye West sneaker, the Air Yeezy, that connection is more prevalent than ever.

But rock fans need not feel left out, because today street fashion mecca Supreme over on Fairfax Avenue releases its limited-edition Vans Sk-8 HI tribute to punk gods Bad Brains.

Although it's just another addition to Vans' hokey "band shoes" category, we can only imagine how cool it would be to run around in these multicolored kicks, while paying homage to one of the greatest punk bands around. Of course you could also wait until May, when Converse drops its Kurt Cobain collection. But we hear people are already snickering at that marketing ploy. And you're on your own if you buy the Liberace kicks.

--Camilo Smith

Photo courtesy Supreme

A travel advisory for emo kids everywhere: You might want to rethink that spring break in Mexico this year. The reason? Marauding hordes of crusty punks and metal heads are apparently taking to streets and pummeling anyone in sight with choppy bangs and red eyeliner. For almost a month now, mobs as large as 800 have been organizing via social-networking sites and hunting down emo kids in Mexico City, Queretaro and reportedly even more cities around the country. Why this is suddenly happening in a nation whose people's affection for Morrissey is well-documented is unclear, and it's striking to see fans of the current radio-dominating strain of alt-rock music in America as victims of widespread assaults. Daniel Hernandez is doing some great reporting at LA Weekly on this story, and he cites this anti-emo rant from Televisa host Kristoff as the flashpoint (with Kristoff's choicest words coming at the :42 second mark). Mexican newspaper La Jornada goes as far as to say it's a result of a social schism after the 2006 election tensions. There seems to be a nasty undercurrent of homophobia here, and Mexican gay-rights groups are organizing marches and meetings with local governments to quell the violence. Soundboard would never condone taste-based violence of any sort. That said, since when do Mexican riot police call Hare Krishnas for backup?-- August Brown

Update: For a far more bemused take on the bruised and battered emos, read Ken Ellingwood from LA Times here.

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

New fix for Idol junkies: Eurovision finals set for Saturday

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

A quick stroll through the rapper-blog gantlet reveals a few things we already knew: Kanye West has been keeping up with his Dwell subscription and Prodigy's latest prison blog for Vibe Magazine is just slathered in awesome. In this installment, we learn what really happened to the Sphinx! After the jump: ironic yuppie Dixie cups, cubist fish tanks and demonic owls.

From the time Run-DMC rapped about "My Adidas," sneaker culture has been more in step with hip-hop than rock. And with Nike's recent glow-in-the-dark Kanye West sneaker, the Air Yeezy, that connection is more prevalent than ever.

But rock fans need not feel left out, because today street fashion mecca Supreme over on Fairfax Avenue releases its limited-edition Vans Sk-8 HI tribute to punk gods Bad Brains.

Although it's just another addition to Vans' hokey "band shoes" category, we can only imagine how cool it would be to run around in these multicolored kicks, while paying homage to one of the greatest punk bands around. Of course you could also wait until May, when Converse drops its Kurt Cobain collection. But we hear people are already snickering at that marketing ploy. And you're on your own if you buy the Liberace kicks.

--Camilo Smith

Photo courtesy Supreme

A travel advisory for emo kids everywhere: You might want to rethink that spring break in Mexico this year. The reason? Marauding hordes of crusty punks and metal heads are apparently taking to streets and pummeling anyone in sight with choppy bangs and red eyeliner. For almost a month now, mobs as large as 800 have been organizing via social-networking sites and hunting down emo kids in Mexico City, Queretaro and reportedly even more cities around the country. Why this is suddenly happening in a nation whose people's affection for Morrissey is well-documented is unclear, and it's striking to see fans of the current radio-dominating strain of alt-rock music in America as victims of widespread assaults. Daniel Hernandez is doing some great reporting at LA Weekly on this story, and he cites this anti-emo rant from Televisa host Kristoff as the flashpoint (with Kristoff's choicest words coming at the :42 second mark). Mexican newspaper La Jornada goes as far as to say it's a result of a social schism after the 2006 election tensions. There seems to be a nasty undercurrent of homophobia here, and Mexican gay-rights groups are organizing marches and meetings with local governments to quell the violence. Soundboard would never condone taste-based violence of any sort. That said, since when do Mexican riot police call Hare Krishnas for backup?-- August Brown

Update: For a far more bemused take on the bruised and battered emos, read Ken Ellingwood from LA Times here.

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

Rapper-blog roundup: Kanye’s architecture porn, Prodigy’s demon owl-gods

A quick stroll through the rapper-blog gantlet reveals a few things we already knew: Kanye West has been keeping up with his Dwell subscription and Prodigy's latest prison blog for Vibe Magazine is just slathered in awesome. In this installment, we learn what really happened to the Sphinx! After the jump: ironic yuppie Dixie cups, cubist fish tanks and demonic owls.

From the time Run-DMC rapped about "My Adidas," sneaker culture has been more in step with hip-hop than rock. And with Nike's recent glow-in-the-dark Kanye West sneaker, the Air Yeezy, that connection is more prevalent than ever.

But rock fans need not feel left out, because today street fashion mecca Supreme over on Fairfax Avenue releases its limited-edition Vans Sk-8 HI tribute to punk gods Bad Brains.

Although it's just another addition to Vans' hokey "band shoes" category, we can only imagine how cool it would be to run around in these multicolored kicks, while paying homage to one of the greatest punk bands around. Of course you could also wait until May, when Converse drops its Kurt Cobain collection. But we hear people are already snickering at that marketing ploy. And you're on your own if you buy the Liberace kicks.

--Camilo Smith

Photo courtesy Supreme

A travel advisory for emo kids everywhere: You might want to rethink that spring break in Mexico this year. The reason? Marauding hordes of crusty punks and metal heads are apparently taking to streets and pummeling anyone in sight with choppy bangs and red eyeliner. For almost a month now, mobs as large as 800 have been organizing via social-networking sites and hunting down emo kids in Mexico City, Queretaro and reportedly even more cities around the country. Why this is suddenly happening in a nation whose people's affection for Morrissey is well-documented is unclear, and it's striking to see fans of the current radio-dominating strain of alt-rock music in America as victims of widespread assaults. Daniel Hernandez is doing some great reporting at LA Weekly on this story, and he cites this anti-emo rant from Televisa host Kristoff as the flashpoint (with Kristoff's choicest words coming at the :42 second mark). Mexican newspaper La Jornada goes as far as to say it's a result of a social schism after the 2006 election tensions. There seems to be a nasty undercurrent of homophobia here, and Mexican gay-rights groups are organizing marches and meetings with local governments to quell the violence. Soundboard would never condone taste-based violence of any sort. That said, since when do Mexican riot police call Hare Krishnas for backup?-- August Brown

Update: For a far more bemused take on the bruised and battered emos, read Ken Ellingwood from LA Times here.

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

Punk rock kicks?

From the time Run-DMC rapped about "My Adidas," sneaker culture has been more in step with hip-hop than rock. And with Nike's recent glow-in-the-dark Kanye West sneaker, the Air Yeezy, that connection is more prevalent than ever.

But rock fans need not feel left out, because today street fashion mecca Supreme over on Fairfax Avenue releases its limited-edition Vans Sk-8 HI tribute to punk gods Bad Brains.

Although it's just another addition to Vans' hokey "band shoes" category, we can only imagine how cool it would be to run around in these multicolored kicks, while paying homage to one of the greatest punk bands around. Of course you could also wait until May, when Converse drops its Kurt Cobain collection. But we hear people are already snickering at that marketing ploy. And you're on your own if you buy the Liberace kicks.

--Camilo Smith

Photo courtesy Supreme

A travel advisory for emo kids everywhere: You might want to rethink that spring break in Mexico this year. The reason? Marauding hordes of crusty punks and metal heads are apparently taking to streets and pummeling anyone in sight with choppy bangs and red eyeliner. For almost a month now, mobs as large as 800 have been organizing via social-networking sites and hunting down emo kids in Mexico City, Queretaro and reportedly even more cities around the country. Why this is suddenly happening in a nation whose people's affection for Morrissey is well-documented is unclear, and it's striking to see fans of the current radio-dominating strain of alt-rock music in America as victims of widespread assaults. Daniel Hernandez is doing some great reporting at LA Weekly on this story, and he cites this anti-emo rant from Televisa host Kristoff as the flashpoint (with Kristoff's choicest words coming at the :42 second mark). Mexican newspaper La Jornada goes as far as to say it's a result of a social schism after the 2006 election tensions. There seems to be a nasty undercurrent of homophobia here, and Mexican gay-rights groups are organizing marches and meetings with local governments to quell the violence. Soundboard would never condone taste-based violence of any sort. That said, since when do Mexican riot police call Hare Krishnas for backup?-- August Brown

Update: For a far more bemused take on the bruised and battered emos, read Ken Ellingwood from LA Times here.

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

Sugar, we’re going down swinging: Mexico erupts in anti-emo riots

A travel advisory for emo kids everywhere: You might want to rethink that spring break in Mexico this year. The reason? Marauding hordes of crusty punks and metal heads are apparently taking to streets and pummeling anyone in sight with choppy bangs and red eyeliner. For almost a month now, mobs as large as 800 have been organizing via social-networking sites and hunting down emo kids in Mexico City, Queretaro and reportedly even more cities around the country. Why this is suddenly happening in a nation whose people's affection for Morrissey is well-documented is unclear, and it's striking to see fans of the current radio-dominating strain of alt-rock music in America as victims of widespread assaults. Daniel Hernandez is doing some great reporting at LA Weekly on this story, and he cites this anti-emo rant from Televisa host Kristoff as the flashpoint (with Kristoff's choicest words coming at the :42 second mark). Mexican newspaper La Jornada goes as far as to say it's a result of a social schism after the 2006 election tensions. There seems to be a nasty undercurrent of homophobia here, and Mexican gay-rights groups are organizing marches and meetings with local governments to quell the violence. Soundboard would never condone taste-based violence of any sort. That said, since when do Mexican riot police call Hare Krishnas for backup?-- August Brown

Update: For a far more bemused take on the bruised and battered emos, read Ken Ellingwood from LA Times here.

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

The Raconteurs thwart critics, but maybe that’s a good thing

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception."

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak -- "Consolers" was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday --  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

The re-ascent of bro core

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band's recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion's been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-'90s ("You and meee ... have a diseeease ..." ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the '90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the "Epitaph Sound" put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.'s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

Everything’s gone green — except for the meat

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

No Depression, lie low in peace

Kyla Fairchild’s home in Seattle is a sanctum of the salvaged homespun: a brick Tudor furnished with thrift-store finds, from the comfy couches to the art on the walls to the kitchen stuff that helped this businesswoman, mom and community connector host frequent parties over Pabst Blue Ribbon and backyard barbecue. Fairchild’s sensibility extends to Hattie’s Hat, the Ballard neighborhood bar she and her husband, Ron, helped save from the yuppie invasions that offed most of the working-class Pacific Northwest’s leisure landmarks. At Hattie’s, the bartenders all play in bands, but a fisherman can still feel comfortable. City council members throw fundraisers there.

I bring up these real spaces touched by my friend Kyla, because a virtual space she helped build is about to endure major downsizing. No Depression, the magazine for which Fairchild served as publisher, is fading from print to ether. For 13 years, that journal was the major organ of Americana music – a.k.a. alt-country, or (after the magazine, in fact) No Depression. Its name was thrifted from an Internet mailing list, which had recycled it from an Uncle Tupelo album title, which came from a Carter Family song. The community No Depression repped believes that things are better when they’ve been lived in awhile.

Magazines come and go, but this one’s demise is hitting some particularly hard, even though the memo announcing it suggests we should have seen it coming. In the last decade, Fairchild and editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have seen their beloved music go from obscure to cool to relatively obscure again. The Americana scene’s traditionalist bent made it an unlikely flavor of the month. These days, pop’s interest in tradition takes a more urbane form, in the music of Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and other retro-soul champions, or the disco faux-stalgia of bands such as MGMT.

Today’s retro-ism has one big plus: It’s more interracial, based in black-defined dance music instead of white-dominated strum and twang. It’s also very stylish. But No Depression (the magazine and the movement) has some great qualities of its own, which just aren’t made for these rapid-file sharing times.

It’s a slow read, for one thing. An issue of No Depression demands focus, not only because its features tend to be long, but also because its writers focus on the craft side of creativity, rather than chasing scandal or trends. It follows artists throughout their careers, even when they didn’t have much commercial pull. Compared to the declarative neon of instant-judgment criticism or the true lies of celebrity profiling, No Depression is actually pretty boring. It’s homemade and whole grain. Same with the music it upholds.

The diminishment of No Depression (it will remain alive, somehow, on the Internet) is a business story, but it’s a cultural one too. We’re living in a time of accelerated change, and most pop consumers seem happy to embrace it. Today’s ruling aesthetic is shiny, quick and fairly low-rent. Thrifting is out; Target is in. But the homespun always makes a comeback. No Depression may lie fallow for a while, but we’ll hear from Fairchild and her friends again.

-- Ann Powers

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

In Style Grammy Party with Rihanna and a chat with Jimmy Jam

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

We’ve got air guitar; Brazil has air humping

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this video, saying that this is one of the hotter tracks in Sao Paulo clubs these days. Now, I don’t speak Portuguese and I have no idea what Mc Creu is talking about in this song, but I have a pretty good idea after watching the video (especially when it comes to the not-so-subtle confetti shot around 2:30). Sure, Americans may own air guitar, but it looks like no one can touch the Brazilians when it comes to “air humping” with control and rhythm. Not sure what to make of the repetitive jaw harp sample, however.-- Charlie Amter

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

A poll by any other name …

If you need any proof of the lockstepping ways of today's music critics, just check out the top of Idolator's Pop 07 poll and compare it to Pazz & Jop at the Village Voice, the old dinosaur Idolator's poll was designed to defeat -- or at least challenge -- in its inaugural edition last year, when they called it Jackin' Pop. If you hadn't been told who was the flashy young upstart and who was the venerable old coot, could you tell the difference?

Idolator Pop 07 Album Top 10 (surveyed from 452 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sound of Silver
2. M.I.A. -- Kala
3. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
4. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
5. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
6. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
7. The National -- Boxer
8. Kanye West -- Graduation
9. Panda Bear -- Person Pitch
10. Of Montreal -- Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Pazz & Jop Album Top Ten (surveyed from 577 critics/voters):

1. LCD Soundsystem -- Sounds of Silver
2. Radiohead -- In Rainbows
3. M.I.A. -- Kala
4. Amy Winehouse -- Back to Black
5. Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible
6. Kanye West -- Graduation
7. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss -- Raising Sand
9. Bruce Springsteen -- Magic
10. The National -- Boxer

Only the bottom of the top 10 gives a little hint at Idolator's younger crowd. I started to do some math regarding the finer points of the two polls, but I hate math so I'm happy to report that someone did it for me. It'll likely hurt your brain, following along with all this parsing and delineating. I recommend stepping away from your computer after three minutes of analysis and then staring out the window nearest you, which with hope will show at least one scrap of nature.

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, the undisputed king? Credit: Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter

Hip-hop trend: the one-word shout

The one-word repetitious shout is the trademark du jour. Case in point: chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy's omnipresent "You!" and Lil' Jon’s ubiquitous "Yeah!" Even old-school rappers are re-branding with one-word shouts. Oakland-based hip-hop legend Too Short all but owns the elongated pronunciation of "Bitch," aka "Biyaaatch," although comedian Dave Chapelle made it famous. Short Dog talks about it on his recent single, "Blow the Whistle":

"I heard 93 rappers say bitch like me… and I'm still gonna yell it every time you see me/what's my favorite word?/Why they gotta say it like Short?/You know they can't play on my court."

--Charlie Amter