"Music for bus journeys is different to music for driving; sitting behind the wheel you are filled with the exhilarating sense of possibility, the feeling that you could go anywhere; on bus journeys your destination is always limited by the bus route, and your music is, by and large, confined to your headphones rather than billowing out of a car speaker system. Accordingly, the best music for bus journeys always seems characteristically introspective, the kind of music made for dreamers and loner."

awww yeah

okayjokesover:

bought my tickets to the last ever lucksmiths show tonight! i figured even i can afford $22, although i am possibly going to katy perry as well (i know right, i don’t know how that happened either), so maybe i couldn’t. but it’s the lucksmiths! for the last time ever! and darren hanlon!

Yeahhhh I’ll be there! It’ll be my third time seeing them, though it would be my fifth if you counted all my previous attempts only to be turned away at the door.

bubububble:

why are the decemberists’ past two albums so disembowelingly boring? why did their previous albums rock so hard, thereby securing my loyalty to them forever, regardless of their current boringness?

This! This! This!

p-perez:

The Death Of Music Criticism, Or How Crowd-Sourcing Killed Indie Rock

Christopher R. Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) - Music Writer, RollingStone.com and Village Voice at The 140 Characters Conference in New York. June 16, 2009

I’ve watched and written about this video before, but ever since then I have re-watched it over again, and I’ve realised this short speech really does hit home the reality that will face the luminaries of music journalism soon (your Rolling Stones, Q, NME et al). It doesn’t look good for them at all.

In a way, this video doesn’t bother me so much in the sense that people will always still be writing about music (probably more so than before) and that varience of opinion provides for fruitful and great debate about the art of creating sound. But I’m unsure if that idea of exclusivity circle jerk kind of attitude within the music community is fully gone as of yet.

There is a certain sense of self deprication with Christopher’s speech, which surprises me for a music journalist of his standard. Many of his contemporaries would be more snooty nosed about the change in music journalism we are currently seeing today.

"But the absence of women from recent, mainstream rock music is troubling. I want to argue that there are two, interconnected reasons: the first has to do the masculinist nature of the “rock myth”, and the second is the increasing commercialisation of what we used to call “alternative music”."

I am very, very close to creating a group tumblr called ladybands and posting stuff about, you know, bands with the people with the vaginas in them. Anyone else interested?

Female Hottest 100

nohemy:

Since females were so overlooked in the Hottest 100 I am doing a little poll on a forum I post on.

What would be your vote?

I am asking people to email me in their vote for the top 5 songs with a lead female vocalist and thought I may extend the vote to tumblr as well.

(via okayjokesover)

Ahhhh thank you! I’ve been grumbling about this since yesterday. Keeping in the JJJ spirit of ‘five favourite songs’ rather than ‘the five best songs’, I would go with:

yeah yeah yeahs - maps
le tigre - deceptacon
asobi seksu - thursday
the long blondes - giddy stratospheres
electrelane - to the east

and, bonus: april march’s chick habit and francois gall’s poupee de cire, poupee de son.

Until I see the Hottest Female 100, I’ll be over here listening to my Where My Ladies At mix, and maybe some old-timey British bands of the morose variety.

"

People say I ‘discovered’ or ‘made’ certain bands, but I never really think of it like that. I don’t have a series of notches on my bedpost. They discovered themselves really, or some record company or manager did, and what I did was what I’m paid to do - play their records on the radio. I didn’t discover The Undertones or Joy Division - they made magnificent records and I played them because I loved them. The fact that most other people were not playing them is the thing, but you’d have to ask them why that was. I think I helped listeners discover the bands, and if one more person has the chance to see Misty In Roots because they heard them on one of my shows, then I’m happy about that.

I don’t tend to mix with bands. I’m too shy or respectful, and I don’t think I would know what to say. I don’t know very much about their history. Also, there’s that thing about not wanting to lower my admiration of them, which I might do if I met them, and I feel they’d certainly have a lower impression of me.’

roamin:

Boing Boing/Richard Metzger

“In 1975, when I was nine years old, I discovered Lou Reed from reading about him in CREEM magazine. It was probably the very first rock magazine that I ever bought. The article, titled “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves”really captured my young attention. It was the coolest thing I’d ever read. The author, Lester Bangs, conjured up a spectacularly ghoulish portrait of a totally disheveled, wasted and just plain old mean Lou Reed even as he hurled drunken druggy insults right back at him throughout the entire interview. The writing was sublime.

I’m not saying I realized this when I was nine, btw, but even that young, I knew I was reading the unfiltered thoughts and opinions of someone who seemed to know about, and feel passionately about, a heck of a lot of really cool things. In his writing on rock and roll, he could really convey strong emotions. Bangs didn’t hesitate to let you know where he stood on groups like Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer (that would be two thumbs down) but when he loved a record or a group, his rhapsodic gonzo prose was worthy of being compared to Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe or Hunter S Thompson. Sometimes his writing was even better when he hated a group!”

Lester Bangs Interview | Lester Bangs, King of the Noise Boys | Let Us Now Kill White Elephants

hipsterrunoff:

Lately I have been attending numerous live concerts after ‘going on a break’ from ‘going to shows’ since the audiences got too tweeny. I have been going through a very concertially existential…

Another incredible HRO post. Bravo, CRLS. (via yvynyl)