« New Music | Home | Son of a Son of a Son »

October 07, 2005

Links/Quotes (as usual)

Charles Cross gets the Art Chantry treatment:

I wrote a cover story for The Rocket, which is still legendary because we had an insane art director at the time, Art Chantry, who I was feuding with at the time. I wrote the first story, arguably, that anyone had ever done in appreciation of the Sonics. I tracked all of them down and wrote about their legendary tours and recordings. It was a massive, 5,000-word story, the biggest story that [The Rocket] had ever run. Art decided to get me back—he would run the entire story, but he would run it in 8-point type. So he has a gigantic out-of-focus picture and then here's this massive story that fit onto one single page. I mean, literally, you need a magnifying glass to read the story.

Mark Jenkins on the ubiquity and mediocrity endemic in today's bands (as epitomized in Spin's Band of the Day):

Oranger is OK, a designation that seems to fit most, if not all, of the other band-of-the-day (BOTD) acts. Perhaps it's unfair to describe BOTD as a sort of ghetto, but it does seem designed to give a little cyber ink to groups that Spin would otherwise feel compelled to ignore. It's a Web feature, so you can browse the list in various ways: most recent, alphabetical, and top five based on votes from the site's visitors. Last time I checked, the No. 1 of all time—which is only a few months, so far—was the Coral. Now, really, what other musical index is so dedicated to marginality that it could put the Coral in the top five? (Other than the U.K. charts, that is.) You can like or dislike the group, but no one's going to hail the Coral—or such other BOTD picks as I Am Kloot, American Analog Set, and Say Hi to Your Mom—as The Only Band That Matters, or The Beginning of a New Age. They're the 2005 equivalent of the Cyrkle, or Gerry and the Pacemakers, or the Beau Brummels (all of which had their charms, of course).

Posted by timothompson at October 7, 2005 12:56 PM