i'm getting The Arcade Fire out of my (visible) chart. the reason is that i hate them. fortunately they are quite low, so i can enlist the help of other bands i haven't played very much (or not played on the computer or recently at any rate).

a quarter-ton of plays will achieve required oneupmanship with added bonus safety margin in case of unprecedented TAF resurgence, such as for instance thru unguarded last.fm radio player incident.

for help, i have enlisted Dr. Octagon, Lard, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, GreensKeepers, Joy Division, Happy Mondays, Mr.…

Two stupid things i have to call out.

1. i want to listen to tori amos. but apparently Tori is inseparable from some kind of notion of "adult" music, "adult contemporary" or "adult alternative". Which means that tags such as the tori amos one are inseparable from reams of Counting Crows crap, Simon and Garfunkel, Coldplay, Five for Fighting, Maroon 5, The Wallflowers, Ben "fuck off" Folds*, etc, etc, etc. Oh, and of course, she's a woman, so that means naturally we have to link her with Alanis. Gahhh.

My question is this: when did we start categorising music…

i hear a lot of stupid lyrics, the kind of lyrics that, driving, nearly make me veer off roads with either laughter or malice whenever i hear them. so i thought i'd make a thread as a kind of clearinghouse for me to be able to remember them all or maybe share some with others.

Updated when i think of more examples… all suggestions welcome.

1. furniture
"This is a song with no words…"
You sure, Ian?

2. a new england
"I was 21 when I wrote this song, I am 22 now…"
Ah, i get…

Saigon made dance/punky/electronic poppy catchy exciting pop exuberance. They liked to listen to things like squarepusher, the fall, bad religion, bis, cardiacs, sex pistols, captain beefheart, nirvana, aphex twin, and such, although their similarity to any of these was distinctly variable. They were described by Britain's The Guardian newspaper as "rock enthusiasm". They lived in Glasgow before it became fashionable. Their one and only album Discography, collecting all the work they did, is now last.fm streamable and all the tracks are available as full-length previews so you can listen to…

Recommended Reading is still crap and dull even after the Incredible Life-Changing World-Saving Relevancy Slider has been implemented.

except instead of brief and easily skippable fluff pieces, it's full of extended tracts of some of the most preposterously dull, long-winded and inconsequential writing i've ever seen, written by some of the most self-important, self-deluded and inconsequential windbags i've ever seen. and there's fewer posts, so you're stuck with these turgid streams of monolithic textual diarrhoea for even longer.

oops? no, apparently not. Anti-A/Z List fascists would seemingly rather eat their own shoes than admit that there could be anyone out…

http://static.last.fm/coverart/300x300/1420001.jpg
songs

does it look to anyone else like they've bunged the wrong cover on this? (it's what last.fm has as the cover for 'Songs', in case it wasn't clear). when i saw regina spektor live i saw the actual proper cover of 'Songs' but i can't remember what it looked like. this one here, however, clearly says '11:11'…

who's responsible for this sort of thing then?

edit > that last sentence was sort of ambiguous; i meant "who should we tell?" rather than "who should we kill?"… so don't worry. ha.

various bands last.fm has recommended me…

recently, the hallowed halls of the last.fm Received Opinion In-Crowd have echoed with the decree that posting lists in journals is officially uncool. i'm, as it were, agnostic about this point of view. i suspect that lists can be of at least as much worth and discussion-sparking potential as, for instance, reams of long-winded turgid prose about identikit indie bands by po-faced pitchforkmedia wannabes, if not more.

(oh, and speaking of discussion-sparking, needless to say that deleting dissenting opinions from your journal and just keeping the ones you can twist to make yourself look…

http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2005/09/26/newsom_050926021757191_ok_wideweb__300x375.jpg

joanna newsom

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3

that is all x

Weekly Top Artists
Sunday Jan 1 - Sunday Jan 8

it is my first week of the year… obviously a good time to start analysing the music i listen to on a weekly basis*

1. Aesop Rock 44
one play each of Labor Days and Bazooka Tooth, plus a bunch of plays of one of my very favourite songs at the moment, 9-5ers Anthem.

"We the American working population hate the fact that 8 hours a day is wasted on chasing the dream of someone who isn't us, and we may not hate our jobs but we…

i've never done one of these journals before, so excuse me for starting with a cliché. anyway, this is a list of pretty much every (name) band or artist i've seen since i started going to gigs in 1996. they're in alphabetical order cuz i can't remember the chronology to any coherent level.

another fun aspect is that i don't even like all these bands. festival free time, support bands, and morbid curiosity all get their fair look-in. some of these bands i really hate; one of them i even came perilously close to a fist-fight with once. this should…