It's a torture to young people, of every generation, when its favorite musicians get "soft." Like, when Peter Murphy, the lead singer of Bauhaus, started putting out post-New Wave solo records with backup singers. I felt this way (wrongly!) when Kristin Hersh started putting out gentle acoustic-guitar music. (She was on her way, however, to 50 Foot Wave, which has an even harsher sound than Throwing Muses ever did.) Or like when REM entered its endless middle period. And Siouxsie! (From goth to cheesecloth dancepop!) Some of them are like Jonathan Richman, who didn't want to hurt any baby's ears. More often it's a subtle graduation—primarily because [...]

Miles Klee: I think I have a little bit of a crush on Generation X. And seeing Pavement play a concert in an apocalyptic Central Park thunderstorm last night took it to a whole new level. It also didn't hurt that Cece and I ran into you, Dave, an authentic Gen X-er (if my math is sound)-by the way, you do the meanest air guitar I've seen in ages. But the point is, I pretty much swooned when I heard the opening bars of "Spit On A Stranger."

Sometime around when he joined Twitter, Kanye West started something called "The Rosewood Movement." Before last night, this was widely accepted as just an excuse for Kanye and his friends to wear nice suits and to have a name for being all-around classy guys. As it turns out, the "Movement" is more than that. In a "secret" and private party at The Box last night, Kanye West and John Legend performed what they called the first in a series of intimate concerts. The only caveat for the attendees was that they all wear formal attire-specifically, that all the gentlemen in attendance wear suits and "hard bottoms," more commonly known [...]

Much of the thought devoted to Lady Gaga has considered her as either a financial entity and/or as a marketing entity-or a straight-up market entity, taking into account the fact that currency is attention and attention is her business. (Um yes and business is good!) But what happens when you judge her as an aesthetic entity, as straight homosexualist Mark Dery does? Let us say he finds her lacking.

"Lead Me On" was the title track of the album I've always half-jokingly referred to as Amy Grant's "Dark Album," but it really is. In the song, Amy sings about slavery, the Holocaust and man's inhumanity to man. "Lead Me On," the album, came out in 1988 and was a financial failure, though years later it would be named the best Christian album of all time by CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) Magazine. They were correct.

American culture is rotten to its core. Not only is Natalie Portman pregnant-while-not-married, but there is such a thing as "public television" and also a thing called the National Endowment for the Arts. If only we could convince the last remaining holdouts that mass culture is the only proper artistic reflection of a democracy, they could all join in on making endless japery from the outputs of a serial woman-abuser who is equally popular on both network television and Twitter! Then it might be, if not quite morning in America, something other than twelve strokes to the dead of midnight.

Yet that is where currently find ourselves. [...]

i walk from the Bedford L stop to the venue called Secret Project Robot in the rain to go see the 10 Year Anniversary Yeah Yeah Yeahs show and by the time i get to the venue i'm soaked and i meet my friend who works for Todd P, the promoter who is putting on the show, outside the venue and i say "hi" and wipe my glasses off with my shirt and my friend says "hey, okay, let me find Todd now and he'll get us in, we're a little late"

so right now Yeah Yeah Yeahs are on Interscope Records and play venues twelve times the size [...]

Death Culture at Sea, with Awl pal Matthew Gallaway on guitar and vocals, has released an EP, "God Loves Lola," which can be downloaded here. They have amps!

Just when I'd "discovered the magic" of Celtic Thunder and become certain that nothing could more effortlessly succeed at making my ears bleed, a friend sent me a link to North Carolina's WinterBand-the most disturbing Christian rock band since, well, since ever. If you're a geriatric, hobo-wizard, Jesus freak with a dirty mop-head hanging from your chin, it's probably not the best idea to be too critical of others. But that doesn't stop WinterBand's namesake, Steve Winter, from attacking Catholics, Muslims, democrats, women and countless others for the intolerable sin of being outside his confusing comfort zone.

Courtney Love is giving it [Ed Note: "it" being her career, in this instance.] another go, releasing a new Hole album, with a whole new band (hey!), through Mercury/Island Def Jam in April. She went on the British TV show Friday Night With Jonathan Ross last week, and debuted a new song, "Samantha," that sounds somewhat like something that might have been left off Hole's classic 1994 album, Live Through This. Which means it sounds better than much of the music she's made since, but also makes you wonder who wrote it and when.

Oh my God, I heard the new Britney song on the radio. For those of you who do not have radios or did not know there was a new song by Britney Spears that "leaked" yesterday on the Internet (AKA how we release music now), you are living in a world where you have not come face-to-face with the monstrousness of contemporary emptiness. I say this as a person who owns Britney Spears albums! As a person who is resolutely unafraid of "oh baby, look at my butt in da club" music! But if you have previously experienced the work of Ke$ha, you may have guessed what was [...]

In the 90s music history We Never Learn, Eric Davidson (of the late scuzz-thrash combo New Bomb Turks) makes the case for what he calls "gunk punk." The term is as tossed-off and derelict as it sounds. A group of punk drifters from the late-80s took a heady mélange of horror comics and sci-fi b-movies, a fuck-all approach to recording, Cramps-worship (or -hate), Russ Meyer and Bettie Page, the Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs classic "Woolly Bully," and mixed them into an amphetamine and beer gumbo under the tutelage of figureheads like Billy Childish and Tim Warren. (The latter's "Back From The Grave" compilations-a Nuggets for forgotten [...]

HEY CHICAGO! Your hosts Tyler Coates and Maura Johnston would love to receive you at 11 a.m. on Sunday, at WestEnd, on Madison west of Racine. Location chosen due to its 11-minute walking distance from the Pitchfork Festival! Time chosen so no one has to miss Best Coast!

Hey now, really, to whom are all these people talking on their phones, all the time, behind the wheel, and in these stores and behind me and even in more improbable places, such as at the pedicurist's? Are you on the phone that much? Do you people not have text messages or something? I personally have answered my phone to only two people in the last sixteen days, and then I don't know who the rest of these people are (sorry, I don't know what the numbers are, and their attending people), and so I let it go to voicemail, except I keep my voicemail full, because I don't [...]

You would have no reason to know that all winter I've been attending night school, in pursuit of my Master's in Gay Mixmastery. (This is over at the Finishing School for Homosexualist Gentlemen, which, naturally, closed down for much of the week after the death of Alexander McQueen. It is in Chelsea?) In furtherance of my degree, I had to turn in a final class project, which, because it is now the weekend, we will share with the Internet for no good reason.