I’m saying the current model for sharing and more importantly for publicizing music is detrimental. Here’s what happens: young musicians make okay records that show they’ve got something but haven’t yet figured out what. The music industry then sells the shit out of it while the music press hypes it equally to death.

I’d like to think that, once we mentally calm ourselves and remember that reading a lot about an artist for a couple months is not a very big deal, we can imagine and try to foster a music world where a teenager can make a small splash with an interesting new sound and then, perhaps, grow and develop across his or her career until that first record is the footnote or rarity that only hardcore fans seek out. Today’s climate doesn’t foster that sort of thing very well, but I don’t think the answer is for everyone to woodshed longer. The answer might be to place a lot less importance on the marketing cycle around a record’s release, and keep in mind how unimportant it might look a few years down the line. Given enough time, the narrative of the musician is always larger than whatever people said for a month about a single release.

…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.

I’m going to write about this post in a few days. “I don’t personally care much about finding ‘great unsigned bands;’ I am not in A&R or publicity. If I was going to spend all of my time focused on listening to the first four or five songs written by a series of unknown acts I would lose my mind, because I am increasingly interested in issues of style and craft that are usually lost on people who are just starting out. I’d rather have people at record labels deal with that and facilitate the process of making finished records. There’s a lot of great labels out there — if I’m going to find something new, I trust them more than anyone else other than my friends and colleagues.”

"To mark the publication of rock critic Rob Sheffield’s second book, an 'I Love the 80s'-style tribute to the music of his youth called Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos took a unique approach to the author interview: a jukebox jury in which music critics, rather than songs, were the focus of discussion."