‘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.

On Rihanna possibly working with Chris Brown. ‘Human feelings are much more complicated than the narratives we try to fit them into. If we’re willing to allow pop stars to thrill us with unpredictable art, we have to grant them the right to make their own artistic decisions—provided they don’t directly hurt anyone else, of course—and react accordingly. We have to understand that though they are public figures who may figure into the aspirations of countless others, they are also human beings, and the most important response to their actions is careful deliberation about the issues raised, not instantaneous (and condescending) condemnation that eliminates their perspective altogether.’

‘Once upon a time, dance pop was about self-affirmation, and the thing being affirmed was usually some sort of identity—ethnicity, gender, sometimes class, and maybe even sexuality. The Nicki generation seizes a whole new subject for pop: not who you are and how you made it, but the meaning and experience of celebrity once you have it. In place of identity, these prima donnas are performing fame. And doing it with what you might even call “taste”: an idiosyncratic aesthetic vision for everyday life, one that has nothing to do with where they’ve been and everything to do with synthetic aspiration. Minaj isn’t being inauthentic about celebrity—celebrity is the most authentic thing about her.’

‘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.’

‘Songs are always already their own advertisements; that’s what makes them such a compelling commodity. But my main problem with BTD is that it steps beyond the necessary function of pop song-as-ad and embodies the form of advertising as well. It doesn’t mean that LDR critiques thus can’t be (unconsciously) gendered (even this one), but to me it’s impossible to get past. We can both embrace the multiple pleasures of pop artifice while simultaneously critiquing its most craven examples.’

‘Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion? The debates that surround authenticity have no relationship to popular music as it’s been practiced for more than a century. Artists write material, alone or with assistance, revise it, and then present a final work created with the help of professionals who are trained for specific and relevant production tasks. This makes popular music similar to film, television, visual art, books, dance, and related areas like food and fashion. And yet no movie review begins, “Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in ‘The Iron Lady.’”‘

‘So, here’s where this experiment fails. This is the point where I concede that it’s impossible to talk about Lana Del Rey without delving into the reams of criticism that attack, defend, or otherwise analyze her existence. It’s the lyrics to her songs themselves that prove there’s no way to think about her on her own terms — she doesn’t have her own terms. What she wants so desperately is to know what we — that is, the default heterosexual male listener — make of her.’

‘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.’

On maximalism in electronic music. ‘Meanwhile, the software's scope for tweaking the parameters of any given sonic event opens up a potential "bad infinity" abyss of fiddly fine-tuning. When digital software meshes with the minimalist aesthetic you get what Ingram calls "audio trickle": a finicky focus on sound-design, intricate fluctuations in rhythm, and other minutiae that will be awfully familiar to anyone who has followed mnml or post-dubstep during the last decade. But now that same digital technology is getting deployed to opposite purposes: rococo-florid riffs, eruptions of digitally-enhanced virtuosity, skyscraping solos, and other "maxutiae," all daubed from a palette of fluorescent primary colors. Audio trickle has given way to audio torrent-- the frothing extravagance of fountain gardens in the Versailles style.’

‘An oral history of the British experimental rock act's remarkable Five EPs.’

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

To what degree Lana Del Rey is camp, and to what degree she is successful at that and we are successful at reading it as such.

A first-hand account of hanging around Young Jeezy for a few days.

‘In other words, "Video Games" sounds classicist at first, "retro" in a vague way. But the closer it gets, the more obvious its theatrics become, even before you take Del Rey's image-building into account. It's uncanny valley pop about an uncanny valley love affair—almost convincing, but just wrong enough to chill and fascinate.’

On Lana Del Rey’s ‘Born to Die’.

‘She’s really quite earnest about what she’s trying, and alarmingly scattershot in her ability to get there — good news for those of us with the critical distance to chuckle happily over Born to Die, and also, perhaps, for anyone who wants to swallow it whole and digest a lot of strange, messy ideas about being a “girl.”’

On Beyoncé's ‘Countdown’. ‘I’m so torn by this. On the one hand you have one of the most dynamic pop songs of the year. Something that roars with polyphony. One listen through and you feel like you could live in this shit, Matrix-like, deluding yourself in its universe endlessly. And on the other hand you’ve still got Beyoncé‘s mind-numbing conflation of feminist empowerment with consumerism and a conveniently male-approved sexuality.’

‘There needs to be room for music writing that’s not just about the author performing taste and making value judgments. So much of the life of music — the ways we hear it, the things we want from it, and so on — exist in a huge, complicated context, and someone needs to describe that context.’

‘The emergence of the Social Media Exile essay has been swift and smug. A language expert dissects a genre while also being seduced by its allure.’

‘Every artist deals with critics differently—Richard Ford spitting on Colson Whitehead, for example. But the rule is to avoid direct contact. Not for John Warner, debut novelist, who decided to seek out the man behind his worst review.’

‘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.’

I wrote this guest post for the Kodak blog. I think they are sending me free Kodak single-use cameras in exchange.

‘What other U.S. group was as good for as long?’

Documentation for Brett Terpstra's TextMate bundle for blogging.

Two Portlanders who blog about their experience in Honolulu covered our Clones of the Queen/At Sea show. Very nice!

“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.”

“What’s worth remembering about Winehouse is not that she had some tortured inner light, or a tragic mien that made her a member of some insipid “27 Forever” club. It’s that she really could be wickedly good at using her brain and her expertise to create music that really worked. There were sad and dangerous things wrapped up in it — fatalism as a cop-out, the romance of failure and sorrow, masochism posing as bravery. But what you tend to take away is good humor, odd clarity, and flashes of actual bravery. At Winehouse’s best, she seemed more than good enough to convey those things without needing a life of tragedy to match.”