If doing what you want is an option for you, you should do it, because your one of the few lucky people who can. And even if you fail, you will be in a better position than if you’d never tried. The competition probably isn’t that crazy. Most people are too scared to even try. Bad things can happen, but every horrible thing that has ever happened to me has added integrity to my art and improved my understanding of the human race.

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?

So the attempt to launch a from-scratch, celebrity-free outlet for longform music journalism has failed. Can a Kickstarter fail “spectacularly”? I don’t know. But reaching 17% of a proposed goal is something, for sure. This isn’t schadenfreude, though; there’s nothing in the Uncool idea to root against, per se. It’s more an opportunity to consider how campaigns like this, when undertaken in good faith, can underachieve. In brief: the idea may be modern, but the underlying realities are rooted in basic political economic realities that date back a very, very, long time.

Still, it would be dishonest to deny that the mystery of Plux Quba adds to its appeal. The fact is I’m particularly curious about Nuno Canavarro because this record seems so personal; I listen and feel like I know him. Plux Quba is a disjointed, unpredictable work that sounds like the aural representation one sensitive and intelligent individual’s subconscious thoughts. Like a mind, Plux Quba veers from one fragment to the next, leapfrogs over an idea and lands on another, recalls a forgotten memory for an instant only to have it vanish before it can be examined in detail.

“Some Other Time”, my favorite standard. The sadness and the space in the music is for me just the perfect accompaniment to the lyric: “Oh well, we’ll catch up some other time.” And you so rarely do. You can hear the loss in it. Resignation. So much of life feels like that to me, of being just short of something, not quite getting what feels right and what you hope for. “Some other time” suggests the future but it’s one that never comes, so it’s a future of thinking about the past. The present moment doesn’t exist here, and that’s where the sorrow comes from.

The problem was, I saw a little too much of myself in these intensely serious, deeply focused young troubadours with their eyes cast downward and their faces bathed in the murky light from their bedroom windows. The revelation was a slow one, but once I saw the pages upon pages of videos of guitar-clutching Oberst disciples, the message was loud and clear: much like these high school-aged shut-ins, you need to lighten up a little. Sidewalks and pigeons and being your own best friend? Moonlight? Having a conversation with your own goddamned window reflection? It was all starting to seem a little overwrought, a little too drenched in false significance and melancholy. I didn’t want to share my personal meaning for the song with hundreds of other sad people, but it looked like I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

Better to listen to music that alternates between disquiet and devastation, over and over, with no respite. Anything else feels like a lie.

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.

Sometimes music listeners talk as if artists are running the show: there’s a stage, and these musicians are standing on it, addressing us. And then sometimes musicians talk as if listeners are running the show: they make music for their own pleasure, and then a vast and fickle public decides whether anyone will be interested, and what chance the music will get to continue. I wonder sometimes if the internet has exploded the former impulse and maybe diminished our memory of the latter…

Get a notebook and write at least a word in it every day. I am starting to think that the best advice—the only advice, maybe—you can give comes out of your own haphazard, irregular, lucky, accidental experience.

Journalism in its purest form is a transaction. But inch by inch, story by story, deal by deal, we are giving away our right to ask a simple question and expect a simple answer, one that can’t be taken back. It may seem obvious, but it is still worth stating: The first draft of history should not be rewritten by the people who make it.

The idea of it — their liberty vs. my need to be gratefully, soberly escorted by virtue of my sex — enraged me. In fact, we should all be enraged, every moment of every day, in a way that words can never express.

In his new book, Mp3: The Meaning of a Format, McGill University professor Jonathan Sterne exhaustively and eloquently traces the history of the mp3 from the initial hearing model developed in Bell Labs to the current debates about piracy. As the author argues, each time we rip a CD to our hard drives, we're not only saving space in our living rooms or ensuring we have the appropriate gym soundtrack, but also reaffirming a fundamental idea about the limits of human perception.

This is a thing I read at (and wrote specifically for) the Pitchfork Music Festival’s amazing Book Fort on Sunday. It is about being both a writer and a musician, and the overlapping attendant neuroses of both.

Ocean’s search was not for songs in a familiar language, but for a Rosetta stone, a key to making sense of the universal message.

You are entitled to be wrong, to feel embarrassed, to feel like a jerk, and to keep writing anyway.

Eighties-style druggy hedonism and the songwriting vision of Frank Ocean.

In response to my long reply. This is incredibly useful!

So that’s the refreshing message I get from the pragmatic imagination of Idler Wheel: to reject the deus ex machina of the fairytale isn’t to give up on dreaming; to love and lose doesn’t have to mean never loving again.

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.

Paul Ford: I don’t really make decisions. Instead, I pick my friends carefully. Then I go where people ask me to go; when no one needs me to go anywhere or do anything I work on longer essays that I’ll publish some day.

"Much of the power of Beach House's music lies in the way it forgoes simple, this-means-this storytelling in favor of communicating indescribable emotions," wrote Lindsay Zoladz in her Pitchfork review of their latest album, Bloom. Switch a few words around, and this perfect evocation could have emanated from DDB's pitch meeting to Volkswagen. Which is not to belittle Zoladz's criticism, nor to build up ad-speak as any more than means-to-an-end capitalist labor. Instead, this connection highlights the idea that critics and marketers often seek the same positive criteria in art.

On the collaboration between the Norwegian writer-producers Stargate and songwriter Ester Dean, who have written tons of hits for Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, and others.

On the height of a performer and what it’s like to attend a show as a woman.

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.

Her flow, including the corny hashtag raps and the growls and all the other forms of play that make her simultaneously so old school and so fresh, have already shifted the zeitgeist and inspired a new generation of pop lovers in one short year. Now it's time for her to figure out how to step up to sound like she what she says on the album’s third track: “I Am Your Leader.”

Now I am older than Keats was when he died and I live in a room whose walls somebody else painted this very soothing shade of taupe and I’m still the same age as Lena Dunham but I’m not jealous of her anymore. I am making a living doing a different thing that I love and I feel as lucky as she has probably at some point felt, and I catch myself whenever I start buying into a worldview that mandates I see anyone a little bit like me as my competition. So good luck to her. May she make the space expand.

The act of archiving an extensive record collection, whether it's one's own personal set or that of a legend, is founded on the idea that space exists to hold time.