Quick hitter post -- REJOICE!

Pitchfork is down!!! Hurray!

Now, with this opportunity now available to the rock-addicted masses, stereogum, Idolator and the Onion AV Club are always better options. I also just discovered SPIN magazine's Blogroll the other day, and it's kindof brilliant in the sense that they can bring people to their site without doing any actual work. But wait, isn't that the premise that all blogs are based on? Kidding. Although, I don't think I'm cool enough to read BrooklynVegan. PASTE magazine is among the best as well. Loved their most recent MMJ cover story. Fantastic. I agreed with soooo many of the points they made in that article. Well done.

ANYWAY, ist's always nice to have a break from their snarky indie-elitism, even if Pitchfork.tv is always worth checking out and they have very extensive music news. My problem with them has always been their criticism. It's altogether too fucked up. (in fact, that could be in the makings of a future columnish thing. stay tuned.) Have they ever rated a non-Radiohead megaband higher than 8? Can that really be taken seriously? I can never get over how misguided and hipster-elite the writers from that site are. Really, they've become just as annoying as Rolling Stone magazine.

BTW, as an indie/alternative rock fan from the Midwest, I'm exactly who these fuckers are trying to market to. And Pitchfork is consistently wrong. Step your game up, Forkers.

Never Mind the Hipsters, Here's "Evil Urges"

I have been waiting awhile for this album.

In the early summer months of 2006, I was introduced to My Morning Jacket by a fellow used CD store employee. Not long after hearing “Z” and “It Still Moves,” used copies of each were sitting in the backseat of my car, getting heavy rotation in my CD player on the road. (And of course, Road Rock is the best Rock) Of course, they were also getting heavy airplay on my iTunes as well, with songs like “Off The Record,” “Wordless Chorus,” “Mahgeeta,” and “One Big Holiday” launching their way up toward “Top 25 Most Played” status.

Later that summer, MMJ was scheduled to play a headlining set at the U.S. Cellular Stage at Summerfest, a ten-day 12pm-12am festival on Lake Michigan in the heart of downtown Milwaukee. I was still mostly unfamiliar with the entire body of MMJ’s work, but I still wanted to see them play that night – July 3. I figured there would be no better way to usher in the 230^th year of our nation’s existence then to take in some beer-soaked lakefront rock and roll with a few friends.

Now, many shows that I’ve been to have been involved some level of inebriation, and many of those times, the inebriation added to the experience of the show. Many people believe this type of activity to be essential to the rock show. Most of the time it’s just fun. However, no drugs or alcohol would be required to realize the majesty of My Morning Jacket live and outdoors. To this day, it is one of the five best live shows I’ve ever seen. Rock and Roll has always been my #1 drug of choice.

Of course, after the show, I couldn’t get enough MMJ, and started listening to more and more of their material. The more I listened to My Morning Jacket, the more I liked their music. They seemed like the only alternative rock band that had the emphasis properly placed on the “rock,” while incorporating major elements of the “alternative.” The band never overtly tried to be different and singer/guitarist/songwriter/producer Jim James has never made it a secret that he loves Neil Young. He also has no problem having an album cover prominently featuring a grizzly bear (It Still Moves), growing a mammoth woodsman beard and launching into extended guitar-rock jams with flying-V guitars. MMJ has never shied away from their Louisville roots and seem equally enamored with classic blues/country and bombastic guitar rock.

But the subsequent success of MMJ’s 2-disc live album, “Okonokos,” recorded on the same tour as their stop at Summerfest, propelled their popularity and genuine credibility (and I suppose, awesomeness) to new heights. The brilliance of “Z” and the nearly-religious experience of their live shows had some calling them America’s Greatest Rock Band or The World’s Best Live Band or even, America’s Answer To Radiohead.

Needless to say, My Morning Jacket’s latest effort, “Evil Urges,” (officially released on June 10, via ATO) has come with the support of some serious hype. Videos of their new songs surfaced online after a memorable performance in Austin. The late-April leak of the album pushed the hype to new levels, when it was clear that “Evil Urges” would be a step out of their normal wheelhouse.

Now, I don’t pretend to be the world’s highest authority on all things MMJ. I’ve seen them once live (I plan to go again when they visit Milwaukee this fall) and I own three of their CD’s. I have listened to most of their music in some capacity, though not all of it legally. However, I did download “Evil Urges” the minute I heard of the leak, and was extremely excited to see how this album would be received by a drastically changing music industry, with new players and fewer boundaries, and older players realigning the boundaries and rewriting the rules. MMJ seemed to be right in the thick of it all.

Increasingly popular music blog, Stereogum, was among the first to review “Evil Urges” in their hilariously titled series of what is essentially a leak review, Premature Evaluation, on April 23.

Stereogum always excels in relating the reality of album reviews, which is that it is mainly a first impression, and not a true assessment of the album as a whole. However, the Premature Evaluations do seem to garner the most discussion on these blogs, and the initial response in the review (as well as in the comments, for the most part, though there were some dissenters who yearned for the earlier sounds) seemed generally positive.

And I fucking loved it. I still can’t stop listening to it. I think “Evil Urges” is among the five best albums to be released so far in 2008. It shows a logical progression of the band. They decidedly knew they were going to change things up a bit, and I could not be happier with the change. More experimental, but more stylistically experimental while retaining their so-called southern-rock roots. The title track is one of the better opening tracks I’ve heard in recent years, the outer-space jam of “Wordless Chorus” turned up to 11 with an extra extended alt-rock jam for good measure. Delicious. “Librarian” is another immediate standout, where Jim James (who gets delightfully poetic on this album) details a potential (?) sexual encounter with a sexy librarian, and goes on tangents about human nature throughout. It’s like an intellectual wet dream, even if it is a fairly basic, bare-bones song that is simple but not the bad kind of simple. The “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream” bookends are both spectacular, inventive, progressive greatness, “Aluminum Park” and “Remnants” are both completely kickass rock songs and “I’m Amazed” simply takes off on the open road with James in both amazement and bewildered confusion at the nation they’ve crisscrossed on tour (in support of Z).

However, one song seemed to really divide people on this album, the obscure third track, “Highly Suspicious.” Now, I don’t believe that this track should be taken seriously in any capacity. It is a seriously goofy song and it is COMPLETELY out of character so it’s certain to alienate a number of fans, especially fans of their older material. In an interview with SPIN magazine, James described the song as (and I’m paraphrasing here) a conflict between a drug addict and someone (law enforcement, perhaps?) who is highly suspicious of the dubious activities (peanut butter puddin’ surprise, perhaps?) of the drug addict. The song is mostly stupid, however, it does have potential as a live song because it seems like it might be kinda fun, even though it’s kinda stupid.

But that’s really where the polarization starts, and the biggest argument against this album came on June 9 – the day before “Evil Urges” is released – from the pretentious online pseudo-revolutionaries (or we could just call them hipsters, for short) at Pitchfork Media.

With their 4.7 review of “Evil Urges,” Eric Harvey of P4K slammed MMJ, and unfavorably compared them to label-mates Dave Matthews Band, and called “Highly Suspicious,” “a loud thud ending any chance Urges had to match the group's previous records. An attempt to merge the band's penchant for live quirkiness with James' long-simmering Prince fixation, the track sounds like My Morning Jacket's version of a Phish novelty.”

With that, P4K drew a line in the sand, essentially losing their final chance at serious critical credibility, delving into hipster anti-mainstream nonsense once again. Last year, they gave a great Kings of Leon album a 5.4 and did major damage to their “indie cred” or something. They’ve killed The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Killers, and just about anybody who made a leap to the mainstream without staying in the bounds of the indie universe. It is entirely possible that Harvey and the rest of the Pitchfork staff legitimately do not like “Evil Urges,” but that’s not the point. MMJ has been on MTV, Rolling Stone magazine, and other mainstream music media outlets, and of course P4K takes issue with this, because they want indie rock to be exclusionary. They want to have good music be like a club with a bouncer checking your indie cred. “Sorry, you don’t like No Age or Fuck Buttons? Get the fuck out! Go buy yourself a Smiths record and get yourself an education!”

I’m so sick of that shit. Fuck the hipster backlash, you gotta stop keeping everyone down. It’s a sick sour vibe and it doesn’t help anyone and is no longer part of the solution. It is no longer a challenge to the rest of the music universe (to put it in hip-hop terms) to step their game up.

So now that MMJ is big business (and I think they knew this while writing and recording EU), they served up some highly suspicious bait for the rabid hipster hate machine, and Pitchfork and the pretentious hipster universe clamped down hard. They know what you want, you want the better of two halves.

The hipsters would have crucified Jesus too, but not for the same reasons as anyone else. They would have said “You know, I really liked his early stuff, but everything after the Sermon on the Mount was just trash, totally trying way to hard to make it big.” Nothing could be more idiotic.

So as they often do, Pitchfork missed the point in their “Evil Urges” review. In a way, “Evil Urges” is MMJ’s “Kid A,” a critically confusing album at first – given the difficulty in following up an album like “OK Computer” (or Z) – but one that should prove to be a major step in the right direction for the Louisville rockers.

But one thing that no critic is willing to say is that everyone was expecting MMJ to be the American answer to Radiohead, and here I think they’ve proved that they are. American music has always fused different music-related ideas together. Like Dylan’s incorporation of the electric guitar in the mid-60’s, or Radiohead’s “Kid A” electronica shift or the Beatles psychedelic movement once the arrived stateside. Now, I wouldn’t put MMJ in the league of any of those artists by any means (yet) but not all positive shift in the music universe was met with critical praise. You always hear stories of how folkie Dylan fans stopped supporting him in any capacity once he went down to Maggie’s Farm and grabbed an electric guitar.

Other reviews besides Pitchfork’s were generally mixed. Nobody anointed them America’s answer to Radiohead and I don’t think anyone thinks they are. They aren’t expected to be and they certainly are an entirely different animal from what a band like Radiohead or Wilco brings to the table.

I decided to read some iTunes reviews of “Evil Urges” (who’s sales may get eaten up by the monster release that is Tha Carter III) and one headline in particular caught my eye. It read, “Never Mind the Hipsters, Here’s Evil Urges.”

I mean…I couldn’t have said it any better. Friday it was announced that My Morning Jacket will be playing at Madison Square Garden – the biggest stage in the center of the world – on New Year’s Eve. 2008, which is shaping out to be perhaps the most important year in music since 1994, will end with MMJ at the Garden.

As far as I’m concerned, Pitchfork is now as much a part of the problem as MTV. Congratulations, you’ve come full circle.

Now about anointing Lil Wayne Best New Music status…

suspended (obviously)

unless i decide to post my CD reviews

ARTICLES

Music Marketing - MLK Jr. and the music business from Music Marketing [dot] com.

Arjan writes on the “gifted songwriter” that is, Alanis Morissette. Are you kidding me?

Idolater - ‘Business Wrier Shocked To Discover Horndog Rapper Also Possesses College Degree, Business Acumen.’ Man, I can’t believe people in the business world would consider NOT taking Ludacris seriously. Totally uncalled for. (please note sarcasm)

Idolater - Garth Brooks thinks illegal downloads should be treated like speeding violations.

Idolater – Idolater hates the Coachella lineup. It might not have Radiohead, but from all accounts, Roger Waters puts on a phenomenal live show.

Idolater - Idolater presents a link to the Village Voice’s last of 2007 year-end lists, but then it’s not there. Singles of the year? Rehab, Umbrella, All My Friends.

Idolater - Results from Idolater’s Pop Critics Poll. If there’s you decide to read from today’s links, this is it. Fantastically done on many levels.

Idolater - ‘What does Barack Obama have in common with the Insane Clown Posse?’

Idolater - Idolater on the Billboard Hot 100. I just found this blog, can you tell it’s already one of my favorites?

Idolater - ‘Someone with a sorta optimistic view of the music industry’ This someone is Simon Fox, head of HMV. I went to an HMV store in Cambridge when I was there, and for a corporate chain store, it’s well above average. Maybe we’re not screwed after all.

Send me dead flowers has boatloads of Radiohead from the ‘93 Feet East gig.’ That must be what they’re calling Radiohead’s performance Audio, video, setlists…etc. Long live the kings.

Idolater - Idolater on the Billboard Top 200 – Who Charted. I feel like they’re somehow stealing ideas from me, even though that’s not conceivably possible.

Idolater - One of the idolater writers has his family listen to music and gets their reaction. The best part? (while listening to “Stronger”) “Sister: You know what's a big factor of why I don't like this song? Those awful fucking sunglasses with the blinds. They look retarded.
Sister’s friend: You look like you have Down's Syndrome when you have them.
Sister: Camp Courage sunglasses. [to Author] Don't put that in there.”

Idolater - Prozac might sponsor Coldplay’s next album. I don’t even have a joke here.

Idolater - ‘Panic at the disco: Glad to be gay, (if they were gay)’

The Late Greats take a look at some covers of “Fake Plastic Trees.”

I Guess I’m Floating’s MP3 grab bag.

Stereogum – ‘Patterson Hood on demanding rock records’

Stereogum – Another idea of mine that Stereogum improbably stole from my brain. Analyzing iTunes Celebrity Playlists, in this case, the automaton that is, Katie Holmes. Her playlist isn’t terrible, actually, even though she’s (I think) saying that it’s her character’s playlist, whatever the fuck that means.

Stereogum – Who needs illegal downloading when you have Stereogum streaming the new Drive-By Truckers album?

Stereogum – 93 Feet East webcast. Long live the kings.

Stereogum – ‘Randy Newman’s totally appropriate, political MacWorld performance’ I just liked the headline.

Stereogum – Live Truckers.

NEWS

You ain't no picasso - ‘Cinci’s MusicNOW Fest to bring in Grizzly Bear, Andrew Bird and Dirty Projectors’ Landmark day for Cincinnati-area whistling enthusiasts…err, Andrew Bird fans.

Idolater - Lil Wayne is arrested with quite the debaucherous arsenal.

Idolater - ‘Chinese Democracy: The present you didn’t even know you were getting’ I'm still not believing anything until it's on the shelf.

Idolater - Diddy is now Sean John. I’m sorry, was this supposed to be relevant? My mistake.

Idolater - Some of the mouse’s “still-innocent” stars cover KISS. Somewhere, Chuck Klosterman and Rivers Cuomo weep.

Idolater - Well, no Jonny Greenwood at the Oscars, which is unfortunate. You know what else is unfortunate? 3 of 5 songs nominated were from “Enchanted.”

Idolater - ‘Coachella lineup announced: Prepare yourself for the Anticlimax’

Idolater - Making as much money as possible by being greedy corporate scumbags must be on The Rolling Stones’ Bucket List.

Idolater - ‘Indie rocker and emo doofus want you to get out and vote for the guy you were probably gonna vote for anyway’ In other words, Win Butler of the Arcade Fire and Pete Wentz of Fallout Boy want you to vote for Obama. Maybe Win should stick to the stage and Wentz should stick to…whatever it is that Pete Wentz does.

Idolater – Some American Idol contestant that received one of those yellow sheets of paper apparently already released a very forgettable album.

Idolater - Lupe Fiasco’s next album will be his last. Or probably not.

Stereogum – U2 look like cyborgs in 3D glasses at Sundance.

Stereogum – Blind Melon has new songs on their MySpace. Did they really have to go with the same name without Shannon Hoon? Isn’t that a little bit disrespectful?

Stereogum – The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are busy with a lot of things, from “recording a new album to practicing yoga to fighting with teenager hotel managers to hurling cow feces at each other.”

Stereogum – Feist’s new video.

Stereogum – ‘RIP Heath Ledger’

Stereogum – The possibility of Radiohead playing under the statue of liberty is so fantastic I don’t even care how much it costs. I’m going.

Stereogum – “Official Coachella Lineup 2008: See you on the Dark Side of the Moon”

Stereogum – Album art for the new Hot Chip album.

Stereogum – ‘Radiohead are weirdo rippers’

Stereogum – ‘Lily Allen suffers miscarriage’

RANDOM SEMI-AMUSING NONSENSE

Idolater - “LOL OMG @ script kiddies taking down the RIAA's site over the weekend and installing links to the Pirate Bay and error messages that read "FTW"! Surely these pranks will make people around the world take your "all music should be free for me and my friends right now" argument really, really seriously.”

Idolater - Hey there Delilah...you’re going to the Grammy’s?

Idolater - Dave Mustaine of Megadeth tries to stay relevant but instead insults every bass player on the planet by saying bass is “one step up from playing the kazoo." Well, I guess if your band plays repetitive drop-D power chords and only break the monotony for screechy, overdone solos, then you probably don’t need much of a bassist anyway.

Idolater - Following in the footsteps of such trendsetters as Fergie and ‘That hot brunette chick from the Pussycat Dolls or some shit’ (her official name), Britney Spears will be a cover girl for yet another magazine – Blender!

Idolater - ‘Advances in neurosurgery allow young woman to “enjoy” Sean Paul’s music once again’

Idolater - Ryan Adams is like the Billy Walsh of the music community.

Stereogum – Kanye is awful at Connect Four.

Stereogum – The Amy Winehouse crack video. Is it possible that the British have the best investigative journalists on the planet? I mean, besides the fact that Amy is clearly lacking in judgment filming herself smoke crack, isn’t it un-fucking-believable that this got into the hands of a tabloid?

Stereogum – ‘Technical analysis reveals EMI to be fucked’

Damn priorities...

My 10-pager on media ethics in the 2008 political campaign pushed the links to the backburner this week, soooooo blog links will come Friday. I did find some pretty interesting stuff, and I'm quickly realizing that one of the reasons that blogs exist is so people can say 'douche' more often. Not sure what to make of that.

In the meantime, heres a clip done by the Sundance Channel in their "Meet the Filmmaker" series. It's about the film adaptation of the novel "Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote "Fight Club," and other bestsellers such as "Lullaby" and "Haunted." Sam Rockwell and Seth Rogen are playing the lead roles. I'm both terrified (because Hollywood could destroy "Choke") and thrilled (because the novel is fantastic and like any of Palahniuk's work, it was light-years ahead of it's time) that this film is being made.