Added a couple new blogs to the sidebar, both courtesy of rockcritics.com Hall of Fame inductee, Chuck Eddy:

• Next Little Things is hosted by Idolator, and is described thusly: “Each week, dozens of songs and albums from up-and-coming (or just plain unknown) bands debut on the world’s music charts. Some of these bands will never be heard from again; some may become the next little thing. That’s why every two weeks Chuck Eddy will be exploring the world beyond the Billboard 200, where he’ll look for diamonds in the MySpace rough.”

• Chuck It All In, housed at Rhapsody, has Chuck discussing the other three hundred records he listens to every month which he doesn’t have space to discuss at the other blog… or something! Appears to be more of a list-y/retrospective sort of thing. In a recent entry, he posted a snazzy list of Bo Diddley-soundalikes, “a wide-ranging, five-decade-spanning selection of landmark musical moments that his beat made possible.”

(Rumour also has it that Chuck’s currently compiling an anthology of his best writing to be published in book form. But don’t tell anyone you heard it here first.)

Ned Raggett provides play by play coverage of weekend events in Seattle… Hope he keeps at this, I always find the post-mortems of this event a little cryptic, to say the least.

Talk about having your shit together.

Steven Rubio has an interesting post up about the Rhapsody music service, its association with Robert Christgau, and the venom (four pages of it) spewed by Rhapsody-subscribing assholes readers about Christgau, and about music criticism in general.

“As you read through the messages, it becomes clear that it’s not just Xgau that the writers hate. They hate the very idea of criticism. Note the problem described above: what gets the writer’s ire is that Christgau dares to give bad reviews to albums the writer liked. Apparently, the sole function of a music writer should be to list the tracks on the album and then get out of the way.

“I think this relates to the growth of artificial intelligence software that predicts our taste preferences. These programs don’t exist to help you appreciate art … they exist to help you find the stuff that already agrees with your tastes. They assume that the listener doesn’t want to be challenged. The rhetoric suggests otherwise, of course … they always claim that their method is the best way to discover ‘new’ music. But by ‘new’ they mean ‘things that are like all the other stuff you already like, only you haven’t heard it yet.’”

I think there’s some truth to all that, but my question is, has it ever really worked differently? Are we talking about a fundamental difference in the reasons people choose to listen to the music they do, or are we simply talking about the means by which they do so? Hasn’t radio been courting like-minded listeners for eons? (And haven’t listeners, in turn, long gravitated to the stations which filled their particular niche?) Ditto music magazines? Ditto live circuits and “scenes”? Have there been more than a handful–if that–of music magazines over the years which have seriously ever challenged their audience’s core assumptions and tastes? I don’t mean these as rhetorical questions–not entirely.

A few blogs have been on my radar lately:

• Bart Bull has a blog, entitled Bart Bull, with lots of reprints of his stuff from Spin and Details. Two interesting notes on his sidebar: 1) he claims to have “founded first American xeroxpunk fanzine, Browbeat, in 1977″ (is this true? was it really the first?); and 2) he generously quotes an unnamed Creem writer who once called him, “The only great rock writer to emerge in the ’80s.” 
• Luc Sante has a blog called Pinakothek, “A blog about pictures. All kinds of pictures.” (”I won’t pretend to specialize or present myself as an expert in anything. Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife.”) Also, read this interview with Sante, about his recent (brilliant) collection of essays, Kill All Your Darlings.
• Speaking of pictures, I can never say too many good things about what may be my favourite blog on the planet, the improbably named, if charlie parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats. Generally speaking, I’m a word guy, but the photos they unearth here always make me feel like I’ve entered the Land of the Lost, and I say that approvingly. Three recent examples of their excellent-ness (all NY-related): Patti Smith & Leonard Bernstein; Nixon in New York (1963); Valerie Solanis.

Meant to mention this last week: On the website/blog Cover Stories, Mike Goldstein takes an album cover, and writes about it at length–extraordinary length–including (in some cases) Q&As with the photographers behind those covers. Not all the LPs covered thus far have been to my taste, but it’s a pretty cool idea for a site.

The link comes courtesty of the always invaluable Music Press Report, which also features an interview with Goldstein about this particular venture.

Some good thoughts on last wk’s blogger piece:

• Tom Ewing in Freaky Trigger wonders if social networking distractions like MySpace and Facebook haven’t sapped music bloggers of some of their energy.
• And new-to-me (which makes us new to each other) blog, Pretty Goes with Pretty wisely notes the irony of the non-interactive e-mail format “since the nature of many of the questions had to do with the potential for music blogs to create a real dialogue.” (Lots more thoughts from PGWP here as well.)

Blabbin’ the Night Away: The rockcritics.com Music Blogger Symposium

By Scott Woods

The idea to bring a few music critics together–virtually speaking, that is–to answer some questions about blogging was borne less out of unbridled enthusiasm for the medium than it was out of a mild but growing disenchantment. If it seems a bit premature to declare music blogs dead-in-the-water, it has nonetheless felt in the last couple years like the initial flurry of excitement across the you-know-what-o-sphere has diminished somewhat. Not to suggest that interesting arguments and lively discussions don’t still erupt every now and again. Or that the obsessive-esoteric pursuits of certain bloggers aren’t sometimes fascinating in and of themselves. Or that there is a single newsstand music ‘zine today even half as engaging as the most inane online chatter. But something, and I don’t know what exactly, has shifted on the ground–and not, in my opinion, in the best possible direction. Hence this symposium.

Perhaps it was inevitable that music blogs, after the initial buzz and howl phase (look ma, no word count!) would settle into a deeper, less noisy groove, but too often the settling in has felt like a retreat into the corner. (From a guy who’s abandoned more blogs than he has fingers, trust me, this is not an admonishment so much as a lament.) Like I said, good, interesting things still happen in those corners, even if it does kinda resemble a high school dance, with participants in the various corners of the room doing little more than nodding at (if not altogether avoiding) one another. Or as David Moore from Cure for Bedbugs puts it, “For some reason a kind of individualist mindset has really taken hold in music blogs, like we’re just here to watch the madmen and women raving from a polite distance.”

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