…the notion of indie exceptionalism (and its white, urban, and upper-class trappings) was repeatedly questioned this year, almost always by the very people who benefit from it. Indie-ness in 2012's pop culture has been depicted as an outmoded cliché, an indulgence for the rich and deluded, a jokey lyrical reference, a house of cards, and/or a pile of cool clothes for pop stars and corporations to try on and discard.

Lester Bangs was a wreck of a man, right up until his death in April of 1982, at the age of thirty-three. He also had the most advanced and exquisite taste…

what has made us all anxious about truth and accuracy in personal narrative is not so much the published memoirs that turn out to be false or exaggerated, which has often been the case, historically, but rather the unprecedented explosion of personal writing (and inaccuracy and falsehood) online, in Web sites and blogs and anonymous commentary—forums where there are no editors and fact-checkers and publishers to point an accusing finger at.

Comparing the excellent work and perspective of seminal music writer Ellen Willis and the horribleness of ‘Record Collecting for Girls’ by Courtney E. Smith.

Here’s an alternative hypothesis: Insanely long copyright terms are how the culture industries avoid competing with their own back catalogs. Imagine that we still had a copyright term that maxed out at 28 years, the regime the first Americans lived under. The shorter term wouldn’t in itself have much effect on output or incentives to create. But it would mean that, today, every book, song, image, and movie produced before 1984 was freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Under those conditions, would we be anywhere near as willing to pay a premium for the latest release?

Rappers are presented as violent, vulgar sexists and homophobes, and then they're not only expected to have fully-formed opinions on social issues, but progressive ones. This is an ugly update on the always implicit, often explicit demand that hip-hop, if it is to be lauded and celebrated, must espouse a strong, left-leaning political message.

…the way that people have written and talked about the searing physical images of her recent performances—her sinewy muscles and berserk movements and haphazardly-scrunchied hair—suggest that she’s providing [an unexpected jolt of humanness in the ever-churning, willfully plastic cultural machine], that she's a savior for those who need one (and, to be sure, not all of us do) from these airbrush’d, cyborg’d, sea-punk’d times. Because the wild physicality of these performances reminds us of our own muscle and bone.

Last night, the Berkeley-bred, Internet-beloved rapper Lil B gave a sold-out lecture at NYU’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. It’s possible that this was a beautiful, inspiring event, at which people rallied joyously around a quirky young entertainer’s timely message of empathy and kindness. It’s also totally possible that the whole thing was an epic tragedy, in which a young man’s urgent plea for basic human dignity was repeatedly laughed at by stoned college kids who preferred to shout catchphrases at him while finding his existence hilarious. I think it mostly depended on where you sat, and who was sitting near you.

I wish for my own voice what Aretha’s has had from the beginning: a sense of self so strong that she had to open her mouth and sing to keep from exploding, to keep herself whole.

Connecting the dots between Fatboy Slim and Skrillex.

People born during a dip in the birth rate grow up consuming a lot of culture that's aimed at someone older than them. People born during a boom do not do cultural apprenticeship, because everything is quickly aimed at them; they watch the things that appeal to their age group bloom and succeed, whether anyone else is interested in it or not. This is why some Americans have spent decades clutching their heads as the Baby Boom generation makes big chunks of our world revolve around itself: Large cohorts have a large gravitational pull.

‘If the songs were dull or disposable, they’d still be important, but they might matter less. But they’re both good, “Birthday Cake” very much so. The quality matters because they’re likely to lodge themselves in the public consciousness and seep onto radio playlists: this mess won’t just melt into the air.’

‘Pity the poor rock fan? Well, no: Rock fans have launched enough snobby, pernicious bits of language at other genres that they could afford to do some penance resurrecting their own.’

‘In terms of its America-sized grandeur and its fixation with the emptiness of dreams, Born to Die attempts to serve as Del Rey's own beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy, but there's no spark and nothing at stake.’

‘1. Go through your piece and flip the gender of your descriptive phrases' subjects. Are there any that sound ludicrous as a result? 2. Are you essentially making shit up about the artist in order to sexualize her? 3. Are you comparing the artist you're writing about to other female artists only? If so, why? 4. Are you writing about a moment where your subject flirts with you and you respond in kind?’

Comparing the discussion around Lana Del Rey to those around Paris Hilton's 2006 album.

‘I don't want to come across as rockist, but this matters. And to pretend otherwise, and try to cover it up with dance steps and glow sticks and an uncomfortable, kind-of-almost-but-not-really mash-up between Deadmau5 and Foo Fighters, is to treat dance music as just another fad to be chewed up by Big Entertainment and bottled up like a noxious pot of 5-Hour Energy.’

‘Woman-beating rage-broccoli Chris Brown lip-synced his single “Turn Up the Music” (without being threatened by Sir Elton John) and danced roughly as well as a third-rate Chicago footwork dancer. He ended his performance by back-flipping off the stage, though sadly not off the earth.’

‘There was such intense (online) media coverage of Chris Brown’s horrible deed, plus indexical evidence of its effects on Rihanna’s face, that it quickly outpaced his musical identity. Now, he’s just tagged as a violent shithead, and arguably the Grammys’ ignorance of this fact only heightened this feeling.’

‘Exploring “what a woman should be” is boring and cliche in the 21st century, and perhaps that is why Lana Del Rey seems to many to be so bored and sad on stage. So let’s take Lana Del Rey for what she is—a pop star playing a role, a woman whose real life we know nothing about—and learn from what she’s taught us about our own insufferable addiction to a vapid version of femininity. In the future, I’m hoping we’ll accept more female artists who are interested in mining the depths of who they really are.’

‘2011 indeed was a remarkable year for the pop body in all of its beautiful, ugly, complex, and grotesque forms.’

‘Modern societies don’t advance if they don’t create new things. So human beings start asking new questions when they encounter a cultural object or idea: what about this can I identify (i.e. what about it is “old”), and what aspects of it are new (i.e. novel enough to create demand for it)?’ ‘The questions arise: What specific aspects of the past are appropriate fodder for new hybridizations, or what methods of hybridization are privileged over others? Most importantly, why is this?’

‘A few years ago, before anyone knew his name, before rap artists from all over the country started hitting him up for music, the rap producer Lex Luger, born Lexus Lewis, now age 20, sat down in his dad’s kitchen in Suffolk, Va., opened a sound-mixing program called Fruity Loops on his laptop and created a new track.’ That was ‘Hard in da Paint’.

‘If we stop looking to the past, we might realize that we’re living in a golden age of music listening and discussion. The Internet has enabled more people to hear more music than at any point in human history. More people are writing about music than ever — on websites, on personal blogs and Facebook pages.’

‘One good indicator of this norm’s normalness? The main criticism you hear about this kind of record—even outweighing references to Starbucks and/or the bourgeoisie—is that it is just too dull to even bother producing any more complex indictment of it. These acts, intentionally or not, have won; they’ve taken a lower-sales, lower-budget version of the type of trip Sting once took, from a post-punk upstart to an adult staple.’

“It’s a portrait of two black men thinking through the idea of success in America; what happens when your view of yourself as a suppressed, striving underdog has to give way to the admission that you’ve succeeded about as much as it’s worth bothering with; and how much your victory can really relate to (or feel like it’s on behalf of) your onetime peers who haven’t got a shred of what you’ve won. It’s not a topic that deserves to be scrubbed up, either; there are things about Kanye’s tiresome self-involvement and moody debauchery — the way he sounds like some sullen hip-hop emperor, stalking around the crumbling gilded palace of his own psyche, muttering angrily and getting aggressive with the help — that belong in any such portrait.”

“And if you want to talk about pop music between 1980 and now, that issue—the question of who’s singing and who’s being sung to—is an important one. The study assumes that hit singles in the eighties and hit singles in the new millennium play the same role in our culture. But over the past 30 years, the weekly charts have seen changes a lot more significant than any surge of ego. It’s not just that pop’s audience has changed; it’s that its whole purpose has.”

“The highest points and most infuriating moments on ‘Goblin’ come from the fact that it’s a vérité depiction of the worst aspects of American boy culture. You know, hating girls because they don’t like you because you’re a weirdo, hating any and all authority figures because they try to tell you how not to be such a weirdo. But most importantly (and scarily), there’s the part that involves lashing out about being viewed as a weirdo, and being summarily rewarded—i.e. seen as normal—for doing so. (It probably goes without saying that girls don’t have the same luxury.) Nobody cares about Tyler the Creator being someone’s role model in 2011. Which in a way, is the scariest thing about ‘Goblin’—too much of his scary fantasizing, for too many boys, is all too normal.”

This Tumblr posts PDFs of poetry anthologies and books of cultural writing and other classic texts, bits of important historical music-related interviews, old, rare, or otherwise important or interesting records, etc. Would that I had the time to take in everything listed here.

Too Much Joy’s Tim Quirk tells the story of his band’s jingle for Budweiser in the early 90s, and how he feels about bands and advertising then and since. A good companion to Matt LeMay’s ‘Art vs Content’ post from late 2010 (http://www.mbvmusic.com/2010/10/19/living-in-the-age-of-art-vs-content).