It's Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Moustache!

(original pic)

And uh-one and uh-two:  End of the year, listmaking season is upon us.  The usual early birds are out, Largehearted Boy has started his list of lists, and I'm thrilled to say that the folks at The Hype Machine are once again ranking and filing rank-and-file bloggers' Top 10 Album lists from all round the online into their Second Annual Zeitgeist.

In a world where two million records (approx.) are released every single day, year-end lists are perhaps the best way to find things people actually love.  By interconnecting all these lists, you can find not only an overall consensus, but folks that love the same stuff you do.  Last year's Zeitgeist was a great start and heartily improved the well-meaning messes that were the 2005 and 2006 Bloggregates; I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with this year.

Any blogger - not just "music bloggers" or "mp3 bloggers" - who publishes a list online can and should submit that list.  Just go here and give them the URL of the post and quickly cut and paste in the names and titles.  But do it soon:  THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS DECEMBER 15TH.

I know!  It's unfortunate, because many folks like to save their end-of-year lists for the actual end-of-year; a lot of people don't have time to stop and contemplate anything until then. Holidays!  Shopping!  Shit.  I think this deadline leaves a significant amount of folks out, cold.  (I was not going to make a list this year, anyway, but I'm so slow that I'm shocked I managed to get last year's out by January 4th.)  The Hype guys seem to be accelerating the cycle not to beat critics' aggregates like Pazz/Jop and the Idolator Poll, but to beat other individual Top Ten Lists.  Such is the way of the web.  I hope they still get a decent amount to input, because I could use some good fucking recommendations for music and blogs.  So if you can, please do.

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Hooray for Effort Dept.:  Introducing The Official Music Tumblr Blog!  And: The Official Music Tumblr Blog's Tumblr Blog!

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A couple videos that I have seen everywhere so it must be a legal obligation to reproduce them:

Never regretted being an early adopter of Ms. Allen's (myspace), and Alright, Still, remains better than that, now (though it's best consumed during warmer months) but somewhere along the line I stopped caring, a lot.  The tiresome celebrity cycle kicked in - the world needs pop stars more than it needs talk show hosts, right Elvis Costello? - and I shrugged when she shaved the sunny calypso stuff from her new material.

But this song - "The Fear" is too heavy a title by far - has grown on me.  Lurve.  Flurry-deep and tired targets, but it's smart enough to not offer anything beyond its own directionlessness, smart enough to embrace that.  Sarcasm as acupuncture.  The tune is lovely, Lily's voice, as always, droll and gorgeous, the vid is pitch-perfect.

Also:  A bunch of colorful balloons with long dancers' legs?  My perfect woman.

Everyone loves this, I do not.  I was on board before I actually saw it, when I heard the concept, which I thought involved a Henson interpretation of the tune.  The Muppets have always been able to very simply sell sadness and hope - it's not easy being green!  someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection! - without objection because they speak to complicated, conflicted childish places.  And not only is it impossible to not like Kermit, the Sesame Street vet has serious NYC bona fides.  (Despite the fact that he plays the banjo.)

These lyrics are obvious treacle, only saved from uselessness by their honesty.  I saw wink-nudge Ultimate Fighter James Murphy (myspace) close a Bowery Ballroom show with this song, and - as if to demonstrate the difficulty in reconciling his great ironic earlier material and his very good Sound of Silver earnestness - he felt he had to stop after singing the first "New York I love you, but you're bringing me down" to explain that, no, sorry, he didn't mean you-in-the-audience-How-you-feeling-tonight-New-York?-New-York, he meant what everyone already knew he meant, "New York."  So for this video, Murphy hides behind some iconic felt in, for the most part, three locations.

Then again, this is YouTube, and expectations are incredibly low in that neighborhood.

tags: lily allen  lcd soundsystem  music blog zeitgest  bloggregate  milkshake  

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