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Column: The Cheat Sheet
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
Do you guys remember November? It was a long time ago, I know, and it probably seems even longer now that you’re presumably deep in the throes of holiday shopping or holiday drinking or holiday weeping or whatever other holiday traditions you observe. But even so, it’s important that we look back on the events that shook the pop culture landscape to its very core during my second-favorite month of the year, or at least the very small handful of events that seemed to have registered at all. So real quick, let’s talk November. Then you can feel free to get back to shopping/drinking/weeping. (God, I’m going to start doing all three of those things at the same time.)
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Good Morning America Hates Gay People, Cancels on Adam Lambert
This is a really, really tricky situation. Adam Lambert’s much-hyped, first televised performance since he finished in second place behind boring, white, male extraordinaire Kris Allen on the last season of American Idol took place at the very end of the American Music Awards. He did his first single, “For Your Entertainment”, and it’s a fucking miserable song—high school theater schlock that only the most tasteless and clueless among us could possibly even tolerate, let alone enjoy.
And as I’m sure you’ve heard, the performance featured a bunch of sexually suggestive gestures: Rubbing a man’s face in his crotch, leading another man around on a leash, grabbing a woman’s crotch, and, most famously, kissing a male member of his band. There was outrage from all corners: He’d acted differently than he had in rehearsals, so he was wrong on that front. He presented homosexuality as a form of rebellion, so he was wrong there, too.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
Wow, you guys, it’s already the time of year when people start saying things like, “Omigod, can you believe it’s already November?!?! This year has just flown by!” I never say things like that because I simply cannot fucking believe how time just crawls and crawls and crawls, but whatever. At least we have a new Vampire Weekend single, right? Happy Thanksgiving.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Kanye West and Lady Gaga Cancel “Fame Kills” Tour
Just a couple weeks after pulling his most idiotic stunt yet, interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to point out that, actually, Beyoncé probably should have won the award, and losing a pretty substantial number of the fans he still had left, word came that Kanye West and Lady Gaga had cancelled the “Fame Kills” tour that was planned to run from November through January. No official reason was ever given, but it seems unlikely that it wasn’t a direct result of the VMAs incident. I even like to think Lady Gaga pulled the plug on it herself, out of fear that public association with Kanye would be detrimental to her career (it would), which has been exploding of late. This has nothing to do with anything, but you guys should really watch her performance from Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago. Shit was bananas, and it’s becoming impossible not to like her.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
Well, finally. After an entire summer spent twiddling my thumbs and waiting for some halfway decent shit to start happening, it finally has. Kanye, Taylor Swift, the Beatles, Jay-Z, Girls… Ellen DeGeneres! September has come and gone, people, but it was good to us while it was here. Let’s look back on it.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Kanye West Hates Taylor Swift or Whatever
For those of you still fighting the urge to fully give yourself over to the whims of the biggest stars from the world of popular music and culture, there were probably bigger news stories during September. But for the rest of us, there was no such thing. The moment Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift as she received the VMA for Best Female Video, we knew we were going to be in for an amazing week. First, the Twitter universe went crazy, and then it went a little crazier. By the next morning, all the major news outlets—and all the minor ones, too—chimed in, and that following night, Kanye appeared on the premiere of Jay Leno’s new 10pm talk show. Not a day later, the internet was overrun with “Imma let you finish” parodies, and that went on for a pretty long time. It was awesome, then less awesome, then not awesome at all. As for fallout from the incident, who knows? Kanye just cancelled an upcoming tour with Lady Gaga for no apparent reason, so something could definitely be going on there. And my mom thinks he’s a jerk now, so that can’t bode well for him either.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
Well, that wasn’t so bad, now was it? We made it through the dog days of summer pretty much unscathed-and maybe we even had some fun, free from the weight of having to pay attention to too many new records, simply because there just weren’t any records to pay attention to. It may not have seemed like a good thing at the time, but it was, believe me. You needed a break, you see, so that you could rest up for all the good shit that’s coming up in the next few months. So let’s take a few minutes to look back at August, but after that? It’s all fall, all the time.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Paula Abdul Leaves Idol, Nation Cries
I know that you guys don’t care about this, but I do, very much, and there’s a good chance it will get picked up by someone on one of the mega nerdy Idol message boards, thus driving an absurd amount of traffic to Crawdaddy! and ultimately earning me a substantial raise, I’m sure. As you may have heard, Paula Abdul has made the difficult decision to walk away from the show that catapulted her back into the spotlight after years of hopeless irrelevance. It was over money, of course, and she turned down a ton of it, on the grounds that she deserved a salary that’s on par with Simon and Ryan. As many before me have pointed out, it’s impossible to imagine the show happening without her, and I continue to hold out hope that this entire thing is but a publicity stunt that will end with her returning just in time for the first episode.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
I don’t know how this is possible, but the summer is almost over. Technically, maybe it’s not… I don’t know when seasons actually begin and end, but for me, summer is June to August, Memorial Day to Labor Day, and so by those measures, shit is totally almost over. This is good and bad—if you’re a student, pretty soon you’ll have to go back to school. That’s bad. If you’re the type who loves to wear white pants, pretty soon you’ll have to stop. This would also be bad. But if you’re the type of person who enjoys when new records come out, well, pretty soon that will start happening again. So that would be good. But maybe you’re the type of person who doesn’t like to spend his or her entire life thinking about what’s going to happen in a month—maybe you like to live in the present, or, better yet, the past, in which case you would be really excited to read about the 10 or so biggest news items in the world of music from the previous month.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Beastie Boys’ MCA Has Cancer, Cancel Tour Dates, Push Back Album Release
We should get this out of the way right now, so as not to ruin your vibe, like, halfway through an otherwise lighthearted column. This way, we can talk about it openly and then simply move on. A few weeks back, the Beastie Boys were forced to cancel a string of tour dates and delay the release of their new album, Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 1, when it was announced that doctors had found a cancerous tumor on Adam “MCA” Yauch’s salivary gland. The tumor is treatable, but surgery was required, and is now being followed by some radiation therapy. He’s expected to make a full recovery, but still… scary shit. Yauch delivered the news himself, alongside fellow Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz, in a video recorded at their studio. Its tone was serious but light, honest and not at all dramatic. Among the shows the band had to cancel was an appearance at this past weekend’s All Points West festival in New Jersey. They were replaced, on short notice, by none other than Jay-Z, who opened his set with a cover of “No Sleep ’Til Brooklyn.”
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
For your sake, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you made the most of May. I hope you listened to the new Grizzly Bear record a lot. I hope you danced to the new Phoenix record while cleaning your apartment. I hope you watched American Idol with the type of dedication you haven’t had toward something since you were a teenager. And I hope you were school-girl excited the day the Wilco record leaked. Because you know what? Shit’s about to slow down to an absolute crawl. Summer’s upon us, and aside from some outdoor shows and some big summer tours, the music industry is gonna go into hibernation, and it’s gonna be lame. But for now, let’s take a look back at the month that was.
This Month’s Most Notable New Stories
American Idol Ends, I Get My Life Back
After five-and-a-half months of devoted, twice-weekly watching of American Idol, I am finally free to attempt regaining the massive chunk of my social life that I’d abandoned so that I could sit around trying to figure out how the American people go about picking their pop stars. The winner of season eight was, obviously, Kris Allen, the young, handsome, God-fearing, acoustic-guitar-toting, vaguely fratty, but still totally nice-seeming kid from Arkansas who will presumably go on to release a record that sounds a lot like Jason Mraz or early John Mayer or any number of other boring white people I don’t listen to.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
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April is, for me, never really about music. It’s about baseball season starting, it’s about the NHL playoffs, and it’s about the first few times I’m able to drink comfortably while sitting outside. But this year, it was also about swine flu, constant rain, and my favorite American Idol contestant being sent home long before she should have been. Also, my baseball team is 11 and 13, and my hockey team lost in the first round of the playoffs. So, goodbye, April. Glad to see you go.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Spoon Books Its Own Music Festival
This wouldn’t seem quite so newsworthy if it had ever really happened before. Sure, between All Tomorrow’s Parties and even that one particular night of the Pitchfork Music Festival, there’s been a smattering of artist-curated events, but none have been quite this clearly the work of one band. The festival, called SPOONX3, is set to take place July 9-11 at the famous Stubb’s in the band’s hometown of Austin, Texas. Spoon themselves will be playing each night, and they’ve promised new material. With that much onstage time at their disposal, one could assume they’ll be playing a fair amount of older material as well. They’ll be joined by friends in Low, Atlas Sound, …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, the Strange Boys, and a few others. Fingers crossed for special guests. God knows they’ve got enough friends.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
Yo, is it me, or was March completely awesome? Over the past 31 days, I made insanely delicious steak sandwiches with chipotle mayo, discovered my new favorite coffee (which I now make every morning in my Keurig single-serve coffee maker—recommended!), listened to Cat Power’s “Colors and the Kids” over and over again for hours and somehow managed to be remain happy in spite of it, got a new pair of jeans, caught up on the new season of Big Love, discovered a new local bar that has $3 Budweiser every Thursday, AND I attended a Girl Scout Cookie tasting party where everyone had to rank eight different flavors in order from best to worst. Tell me about your month in the comments, please. Or, just read about all the stuff that happened in the music world, then get back to work or whatever.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
“Dark Was the Night” Concert Coming to Radio City
Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National took the reins on a compilation that was released in conjunction with the good people at AIDS awareness advocacy group the Red Hot Organization, and now they’re putting on an all-star show at Radio City Music Hall on May 3rd. The bill features Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, My Brightest Diamond, Feist, and a number of other artists who contributed tracks to the disc. Considering the kind of company the boys in the National tend to keep, you should expect an awful lot of top-tier special guests.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
I don’t like February very much. Where I live, it’s still ridiculously cold, and as much as I like the winter and the weather that comes with it, I think the truth is that I only like it because I associate it with Christmas and my birthday, two occasions for which people buy me things. But come February, those two occasions are long gone, and all I have is seriously dry skin and fantasies about drinking beer outside in the sun, which can’t realistically happen with any kind of consistency for another two months. If nothing else, though, at least there are the Grammys to help get me through the dark times. And news about the Barenaked Ladies.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Bonnaroo Lineup Announced
Well, it’s March now, which means you should be getting ready to spend the next five months of your life hearing people talk about summer music festivals. Who’s playing them, who went to them, who accidentally got dusted at them, and so on. It’s exhausting, but it’s a sad fact of my life, which I’m done trying to avoid. So, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to play along.
This Week’s Record Releases
by: Mike Conklin
Midlake release "The Courage of Others" on Feb. 2nd
Hello there, my name is Mike. I’m the guy who, for the past… god, two years, I guess, brought you the Cheat Sheet, a monthly column going over the biggest news stories and record releases of the previous month. It was meant to serve as a one-stop shop for anyone whose eyes maybe weren’t glued to their computer screen looking for music news at all times.
Funny thing, though: Those people don’t actually exist. Everyone knows everything as soon as it happens, and they need to be told what to think about it immediately. So they turn to the blogs, who are competing with one another for page views, which you need about a gazillion of in order to sell an ad anyone. Then blogs do something called Search Engine Optimization in hopes that when some sad sack loser Googles “I like Lady Gaga’s hilarious costumes,” their blog will be the first site that shows up. So then the blogs start covering really stupid things because people are generally really stupid and perform internet searches for really stupid things. So it’s a race, basically, to see who can cover the dumbest thing the fastest, on a site that’s most conducive to search engines. You know, journalism.
Anyway—and this is not to bitterly imply that what I was doing had anything to do with journalism—no more Cheat Sheet. But! Now, every Monday, I’ll tell you about all the records being released that week. Because in 2010, nothing matters more than release dates, since records never leak and are never available months before they’re officially available to be purchased.
So without further ado, this weeks releases! Which happen to be not all that exciting! read more
by: Mike Conklin
published: February 1, 2010
in column: Reviews, The Cheat Sheet, What Goes On
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