Sunday, March 23, 2008

Here's a Ray Davies interview, in which he says he'd consider doing a project with Chrissie Hynde if it could be done by email instead of in person

NPR on LibraryThing, GoodReads and other bookish sites


Billy Bragg on the internet "royalty scam"


A rundown with video etc of Yo La Tengo at SXSW

Malkmus and Jicks on Minnesota radio


Every article about every r.e.m. album in the past dozen years: they kind of dismiss the album immediately previous to the new one, reassert the quality of some of the songs from the 2 or 3 albums before and claim that the new album is new/challenging/different with echoes of the great past. The band and journalists seem to be pretty good about agreeing on these talking points: here's another article.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am a serious fan of R.E.M. through the Up album (1998), but you are correct.

A few years ago, Jim DeRogatis wrote an insightful cover story for Pulse (Tower Records' in-house magazine), where he refused to follow the talking points set by the band (and he makes it clear R.E.M. and their management were setting up a specific storyline and demanding that journalists follow it). Among the juicier tidbits DeRogatis reveals is the fact that Warner Brothers withdrew advertising from Mojo magazine for a time because the magazine ran a front cover story on R.E.M. without the band's participation.

Anonymous said...

I think what I find even more amusing /interesting (in its own way) is that the talking points have been the same for album after album for a while...