There are all kinds of files. A song is just a file, as is a book, and so is a movie. People have been pointing this out for years, usually to explain piracy. For a long time, folks were gnashing their teeth and wailing that no one would pay for anything on the Internet ever; it was just too easy to steal. They went from renting their garments to renting out music. As solutions emerge, and marketplaces for licenses emerge, you have to wonder if new kinds of media will remain part of the free, “remix” culture of the Internet, or if they’ll want to participate in a for-pay market. Maybe the reason so much great creative work on the Internet is free is that it’s been too hard to charge. A Pandora, but for podcasts! A Spotify for funny animal videos! Once the framework is in place, the pitches will come. Then the licensing can start. After all, they’re just files.

To listen to this LP on headphones is to be air-dropped into a teeming megacity in 2017: industrial runoff, overgrown wild vegetation, human multitudes, handheld devices, improvised survival technologies, strange weather; bodies and machines in a necessary, dignified symbiosis.

Up until very recently, I'd recount my online experiences with some degree of shame or sheepishness, but in this apocalyptic year of 2012, that embarrassment is beginning to fall by the wayside. I've been having more and more conversations with people grappling with what is gained and lost by how some of our most meaningful musical discoveries-- not to mention life experiences-- have happened in front of, or facilitated by, screens. We're starting to come to terms with the fact that modern life is a constant, awkward/elegant oscillation between the digital and physical, faces and FaceTime, and we're starting to hear music that reflects this reality, the beginnings of a new ordinary.

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.

Shaking the Habitual is, inarguably, an achievement. It is the Knife's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal: It provides a glimpse into the desires, intellectual enthusiasms and (unsurprisingly dense) reading list guiding one of music's most shadowy duos. At its most mesmerizing, its conceptual rigor and occasional inscrutability are overpowered by a disarming earnestness: It is a musical manifesto advocating for a better, fairer, weirder world. Shaking the Habitual feels not post-human but profoundly humanist, fueled by an unfashionable but profoundly refreshing faith in music's ability to hypnotize, to agitate, and to liberate.

It begins and ends with "Ball and Biscuit," and by "it," I mean "Western civilization." The 21st century's most astounding, most wryly pornographic, most brain-meltingly electrifying blues song. Did the electric guitar even exist prior to "Ball and Biscuit"? Did distortion? Did hype? Did critical praise? Did the colors red and white? Did outlandishly oversize declarations of virility? Has there been a single memorable guitar solo performed anywhere, by anyone, in the decade since its release?

Shaking the Habitual, like most of the music The Knife have made to date — along with singer Karin Dreijer Andersson's solo album as Fever Ray — is, at its core, very goth in its tone and themes. Relentlessly morbid, intentionally unsettling, and alluring in its romanticized bleakness. But despite this, it's pretty rare that you see anyone label The Knife as goth, perhaps because they've avoided the most obvious signifiers of the subculture every step of the way. The Knife aren't about goth as living in a permanent Halloween; they're about that connection between romance and horror. And those feelings are a big part of being engaged with social justice issues: the outrage directed at oppressors, the frustration with cultures that refuse to change, the unshakable fear that the world is only getting worse, the loneliness of feeling like a hated outsider, the thrill of finding a like-minded community. They've done this better than pretty much anyone else in music; it's just too bad that they went a bit too far in advertising it.

At his worst, he’s an immature egomaniac whose insufferableness comes from being too aware of his own faults. For a guy who was tempered in internet culture, whose personality was always reflected in some digital form or another, it’s an understandable tack to take. Thankfully he’s done a fine job of making the journey to the center of his id a curious and engaging one.

When I think about the difficulty I’m having listening to Wolf, I remind myself that there are dozens, hundreds of albums that inflict similar psychic pain on people because of their race or gender or experience that I’d never notice on my first or tenth listen. Everyone’s flashpoints are different, whether they’re homophobic slurs or racial epithets or sweeping, harmful generalizations about a genre or culture or all three. As a critic and person, confronting such a flashpoint is an eye-opening, educative experience, and for that I suppose I’m thankful for Wolf, even if I might never actually hear the album.

The endearingly bookish singer talks about the nature of performance and love as well as his recent Collection of Rarities and Previously Unreleased Material.

On P2P sites, most things that seemed too good to be true actually were: SEO-baiting, fantasy-football remixes ("Big Pimpin' Remix [ft. Eminem, Dr. Dre, DMX, Nas, Biggie and Tupac"), "covers" that were actually just the original song ("You Really Got Me" by the Who turned out to just be the Kinks’ version), or painfully obvious amateurs uploading their demos and calling it, say, "Beastie Boys-- Intergalactic ALBUM VERSION."

Karin: It's important to question my story and my way of telling it, too. It's good to ask questions instead of serving answers.

It’s all clues, loud and electrified. GY!BE dare you to personalize the brambly politics of the music, and on Allelujah!, they’re finally very, very clear on that point.

Canada has a new subterranean truth, and that truth is that the majority of Canadians are conservative thinkers. I can think of no better time for one of Canada’s most respected protest bands, living in one of Canada’s most progressive cities, to talk about health care, taxation, First Nations and Aboriginal rights, women’s rights, fucking anything but how “The gatekeepers gazed upon their kingdom and declared that it was good.” Which: yeah. And?

Unless the stars are aligned for your band, no.

The catch is, this might be a terrible time to sell refined elegance and expensive menswear to a pop audience. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' "Thrift Shop," the biggest pop hit of the past few months, is the polar opposite of "Suit & Tie" on a lyrical level, with the scrappy indie rapper essentially flipping off Timberlake's high-end style and celebrating the joy of creating a distinct look from dirt cheap items at the Salvation Army.

Without some sort of personal framework for approaching music, and expectations for what you think music should and shouldn’t be doing, there wouldn’t be much point in engaging it. And as pop and indie and hip-hop and R&B and metal all currently share a pretty close-knit territory, defining what you stand for might be the best preparation for the looming fallout from those who too often let us know what they are against.

Matthew isolates individual moments from songs released this past year, and then very briefly explains why he likes these moments while allowing you to hear them. On one hand, he’s an electronic music composer himself, so he knows what he’s talking about in technical terms. On the other hand, it’s a very personal peek into the nooks and crannies of a music fan’s brain—what those things are that made him go “eh?” other than a cool chorus or a lyric segment. On the third hand (I have three hands, it helps with chores), a lot of these are just cool sounds. Listen and follow along.

Taking stock of Beck’s career 20 years after “Loser.”

Robert Christgau reflects on the art of writing well about music.

The early history of MTV, with parallels to modern technology movements.

There's no conspiracy to recreate 1940s and 1950s childhoods. Rather, one era produced more enduring pop Christmas tunes than any other for social and technological reasons.

YouTube crushing everything does seem like a concern. I love novelty songs, I ride hard for novelty songs—but if, suddenly, all our big hits are goofy YouTube-incubated one-offs, the novelty song will cease to be novel.

When there is an influx of content, criticism, information, details, write-ups, reviews, and analyses to be read, it can greatly impede the progress and expansion of art. Suddenly, without even realizing it, it is seven hours later, all you’ve done is read reviews, then you’ve read reviews of reviews, and your mind is so gone that the only thing you know you can do is to pick up that guitar and let out the emotion through your fingers and onto the fretboard, whaling on it until you’re revived enough to return to the digital world.

81 years later, Lomax’s quandary is a different issue. Rap Genius aims for a comprehensive archive of rap meanings, while redefining the idea of “genius” altogether. The intelligence of a single person is replaced by a self-correcting form of knowledge derived from the crowd, which often leads to populist rhetoric that papers over very real power differentials and well-established hierarchies. The site’s investors invest their venture with bold religious significance, but practically speaking, perhaps the real genius is in transsubstantiation, via a technological capacity to turn pleasurable activities into value-producing labor. It’s the same logic that fuels Wikipedia and Google search results: a free market of anonymous contributors is a vastly better information aggregator and processor than an individual human brain, and a killer app is all that’s needed to derive stable meaning from the messiness of culture.

A mediation on the late rock icon's strange journey from being a guy in a band to an idea that keeps cycling through culture via social media and our own minds.

Suggests 'Countdown to Ecstasy'.

As if matching bitter, poetic cynicism with freewheeling jazz-rock wasn’t enough, with 'Gaucho', Fagen and Becker approached anti-music in the same way that plastic surgery approaches being anti-human: somehow, shreds of the same ideals are in tact, but they’re pushed to queasy extremes.

Record reviews are now brief, upbeat and simple: download these songs, they’re good. Beyond that service, writers don’t provide much real value. They are unlikely to establish a strong connection with their readers, as no sense of prejudices and predilections can emerge from four sentences (at least one of which is going to be strictly informational). And you can’t even blame space. They are simply kowtowing to the preferences of those readers who care the least.

Like its predecessor, mbv feels like an album in part about love, but it approaches the grandest of human emotions from an unusual angle.