A brilliant piece of literary criticism for a novelette I loved and am looking forward to the next installment of. As a metaphor for acculturation into empire, this works almost too well. You can walk in the halls of empire, yes, as long as you're willing to accept invasive alien tentacles into your mind, to put alien needs above your own, to allow yourself to be instrumentalized.

Love is a dog from hell, as it's said, and real emotion is ugly and uncomfortable, and it’s why some people giggle when they see a man keening or screaming or crying -- but Drake knows that all this has to be tempered and digestible to be disseminated and reach as many people as possible.

There's something taunting and mean about the soul samples on Yeezus; they are like nightmare versions of West’s earliest work.

Author Devon Powers on how Village Voice writers Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau helped create rock journalism, and the evolving role of music critics.

Rap music clearly has a serious misogyny problem. Admitting that won't lead to the elimination of the music altogether and it doesn't mean that all other social issues have to take a backseat. But once the problem has been acknowledged, let's don't just leave the self-evident truth sitting there. Actually continue to think about this stuff. Too often, rap's misogyny has been treated as a given. And that's just as dangerous.

But as much as he was teaching me about movies, Roger Ebert was also showing me how to write-- I became a student of clean and concise sentences that emphasized clarity and the right balance of humor, thoughtfulness, and accessibility, as well as how to shape my raw impressions into well-rounded opinions that cohered on the page into narratives. The idea that the most interesting part of a movie happens after you see it-- during the post-mortems you have with others and with yourself in your own head-- was something that carried over easily to the songs and albums I was discovering at the time.

What endures more, for me at least, is the pleasure of thinking about a work of art, arguing with myself over it, getting frustrated while going nowhere and then coming out of that mess with a slightly clearer sense of what I believe. Or maybe it’s a better context to put the work in. Or it could be as minor as solving the problem of striking the right tone to end a review in a way that captures exactly what I think with a bit of flair. The privilege of calling that your job is, to steal a phrase from Hamlet, devoutly to be wished.

Everyone's relationship to music has changed because of the Internet, and in a way that invalidates year-in-review summaries: We rank and file music all year long on our blogs and web magazines, in the list-drenched advertorial press, and even on our iPods. If everyone's a critic, do we still need a critics' poll?

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.

It’s scary how the Memo makes Sandler and Murphy whipping boys, simply to sustain true Hollywood vulgarity. It perpetuates the collapse of critical thinking. When Sandler-bashing (and I don’t just mean the ludicrous Razzies, ratified only by tabloid media) turns into excoriation, it is necessary to examine the media’s cowardice and prejudices. The Sandler Memo has reduced criticism to a profession of chain letters.

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

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.

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.

‘”What To Expect” is, then, finally, a self-fulfilling prophesy, because what to expect as an expectant mother today is to be bombarded with information about how you are doing it wrong—whether it is carrying a baby in your womb, pushing it out, or raising it.’

‘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.

‘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.’

‘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.’

‘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.’

“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.”

“Criticism is only useful when it helps us see something we are having difficulty seeing on our own; it’s not helpful when it tells us to stop looking. ‘But what if everyone pays attention to the wrong things? We have to guide them to the right things!’ Well, eventually everyone stops paying attention to everything: time is pretty effective that way. With that in mind, we should only worry about pointing the good out, and not worrying about the bad. And in the age of the Internet, this dictum takes on added force. Think of it as the Paris Hilton effect: talking about the bad just encourages the bad. No one has ever cured a celebrity of anorexia by posting photographs of her on the Internet, or has helped Charlie Sheen get off alcohol by getting exasperated at his stupidity. Trashing bad people and bad art does not make you a good person.”

“A writer’s search for journalism in the age of branding.” In which Maureen Tkacik engages in a number of jobs she wouldn’t otherwise take to explore them journalistically and try to get at the heart of the ‘nothing economy’. This is a great piece, and I think the reactions (in the comments and in my knee, occasionally) questioning her ‘legitimacy’ and hypocrisy illuminate the very problem she’s talking about. I think the idea of injecting a journalist experience into a piece are wonderful, because so-called straight journalism is often a myth and because it can make the writing and reading better.

Nitsuh explores the Black Eyed Peas iPad app, and why so much party pop music — which is so often aspirational — has been sounding “rote and blanched of purpose”.