Search results for: regina spektor

The Who at the Super Bowl, and Other News Who

The Who For their first performance in the States since 2008, speculation abounds that the Who will be playing the halftime show at Super Bowl ’10, to take their place among such musical elite as Paul McCartney, Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones, and, uh, Janet Jackson. (Billboard)

Peter Gabriel will be releasing a covers album this coming spring, doing renditions of songs by artists including Bon Iver, Regina Spektor, Elbow, and Lou Reed. Awesome. (CD Insight)

Oh, how we are starting to really loathe Ticketmaster. Much like what happened with those Springsteen ticket sales some months back (they were accused of holding out tickets for their secondary seller, TicketNow), the giant corporation is being confronted with allegations that a similar situation has arisen with Taylor Swift and Keith Urban tickets. (TicketNews)

The FCC may very well be relaxing media ownership rules come 2010, like by permitting a TV station and newspaper to be under the same ownership or allowing one entity to own multiple TV stations in the same market. This could be good news for struggling media outlets. (Forbes)

Andrew Bird has been quite busy of late. He’s doing a film score, working on an art installation, and doing a track for the Muppets tribute album Muppets Revisited. (Pitchfork)

Regina Spektor

by: Dan Weiss

Regina Spektor
Far
(Sire, 2009)

Let’s get personal. A music fan I know is blowing my mind right now with screeching hatred for Regina Spektor. To wit, “I really just don’t get what’s to like about this. At its absolute best, it’s unobtrusively dull. But mostly it’s just so, so trite and precious and punchable.” Let’s upturn the glass and say, at absolute worst, Far is unobtrusive and dull. But except for the atheist-baiting single “Laughing With”, the whole affair is almost offensively inoffensive.

Unless you count “Stillness Is the Move” or Bat for Lashes (and please don’t), this is not a banner year for women in the music press. Lily Allen shored up an absolutely unusual amount of spew earlier in the year for an album that talked back to soft dicks (of both kinds), and in my circles, Far looks to earn the same. Granted, her “preciousness” is mostly due to her proximity to the so-called “anti-folk” scene wherein she spun her wheels until the Strokes bagged her for a tour, though neither she nor empath Kimya Dawson is as cutesy as she’s made out to be. On Spektor’s last album, she reminisced on freaking out the second time her boyfriend OD’d, dropping it suddenly and unsettlingly into what began as a nostalgic walk-about eating tangerines (“so cheap and juicy!”). She made Samson pissed that the Bible didn’t mention Delilah (“not even once!”) and resigned himself to a slice of Wonder bread. She turned her vocal intonation into an effective device for her kid song (“If I kiss you where it’s sore / Will you feel bettaw?”) and loved nobody fully. But let’s get one thing straight right now: If these predilections are anti-folk, then Jewel is Kimya Dawson.

by: Dan Weiss

published: June 25, 2009 in column: Reviews

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I Got My Radio On

by: Denise Sullivan

When Sam Cooke sang, “We’re havin’ a party, everybody’s swingin’, dancin’ to the music, on the radio,” it probably never occurred to him or anyone else back then that, 50 years on, “Having a Party” would be at the foundation of an enduring category of songs about listening to the radio.

Sure, a line like, “So listen, Mr. DJ, keep those records playing,” conjures the sound of a crackly radio and is loaded with nostalgia. But there’s more to it. Unlike playing a record at home, a song’s airing also somehow sanctifies it (just ask any musician about the moment they first heard their song on the radio and they’ll tell you about it in great detail). It seems radio’s transcendent properties are at their greatest when experienced by a person alone, late night, in the car or underneath the sheets with a transistor—that is, if you believe what the radio songs have to say. And when it comes to airplay, whether on the AM, the FM, or the BBC, from Wolfman Jack to John Peel, a song about the radio is radio-friendly, an idea that is not lost on artists, producers, and record labels. Of course, the radio, DJs, and their picks provide contact with a greater music community, though in our personalized, fragmented, and isolated listening worlds, those aspects of radio listening are all but forgotten. But before I get too teary-eyed, let’s get to the radio songs.

by: Denise Sullivan

published: December 3, 2008 in column: Origin of Song

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