Everybody Needs a 404

In 1996, Fatboy Slim released his single “Everybody Needs a 303,” and the genre that would become known as Big Beat was born. The song paid tribute to the Roland TB-303, a bass synthesizer/sequencer that had long been a key component in the hardware arsenal of many influential electronic music composers. The instrument initially helped define house music as Chicago musicians picked up and manipulated the 303, and its squelchy synth patterns became ubiquitous when the acid house boom took hold in the early ‘90s.

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Brendan Benson - My Old, Familiar Friend: Review

The annals of power pop make for intimidating reading to anyone who fancies chancing their arm at some candy-flossed vocal harmonies and sing-along-a choruses. How do you match up to ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’ or ‘My Sharona’ or ‘Surrender’? And that's not accounting for early trailblazers like Big Star, Badfinger and the Raspberries. It’s a wonder that anyone bothered to continue with the genre by the time 1980 rolled around. With the bar set at an impossibly high standard, power pop seemed sewn up, the masterclass was over, the only way was down.

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The Selling of a 21st Century Pop Star

Hundreds of used copies of Lady Gaga’s The Fame are freely available at knockdown prices on Amazon and EBay. It’s not surprising; journalists were flooded with copies of the CD prior to its release in August 2008. Sometimes, multiple copies of the disc would even arrive in the same week. Her name wasn’t as recognizable back then, her ubiquity still agonizingly out of reach. Fast forward a year and it’s difficult to imagine Gaga having many aspirations left, although her bolshy, Madonna-esque outlook on life would never allow her to admit to that. For Lady Gaga, this is just the beginning.

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Squarepusher - Solo Electric Bass 1: Review

Tom Jenkinson’s process of disentangling himself from the world takes another step forward on Solo Electric Bass 1, his latest outing as Squarepusher. The performance is exactly as the title suggests — Jenkinson, alone with his bass, playing in a club in Paris, committed to tape in September 2007. It’s a lonely album, recorded at low volume, with playing that crawls to a whisper and then bloats into a puffy slap bass fracas. Music recorded in solitude often has a particular quality, a feeling that the rest of the universe has been quarantined so the creator can chase perfection around a studio. Here, Jenkinson takes his most introspective music to date out into the open, allowing an enraptured audience to whoop, cheer and applaud as he quietly retreats into his own indulgence.

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Clint Mansell - Moon (sountrack): Album Review

There are two Clint Mansells. The first Clint is a gurning idiot who spearheaded the odious grebo movement as part of Pop Will Eat Itself. The pinnacle of Clint #1’s success involved shoehorning pop culture references into songs with a sledgehammer-like subtlety (“Alan Moore knows the score!”). The Poppies officially broke up in 1996 and Clint #1 disappeared off the face of the Earth. Clint #2 surfaced two years later with the surprisingly mature soundtrack for Darren Aronofsky’s first movie, Pi. Stourbridge, jester hats and high ponytails suddenly seemed a world away. Clint #1’s lyrical sledgehammer had been tucked away in a cupboard with a pair of tatty Dr. Martens boots.

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Chris Brown and the Death of the Music Video

So video didn’t kill the radio star after all. For a while back there, it even seemed like the two mediums were happy to co-exist. Radio proved to be a remarkably resilient beast, while video became an artform in its own right via innovative work from directors such as Russell Mulcahy, Spike Jonze, and Michel Gondry. Certain posthumous commentaries on Michael Jackson’s career recalled the halcyon days of MTV, and how he became the first African American artist to gain heavy rotation on the network. Jackson did more than that-—his “Billie Jean” and “Thriller” videos helped establish MTV as a powerful force in the American pop culture landscape.

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Deerhunter/No Age/Dan Deacon: Live Review

The ‘round robin’ format is gaining real traction in the United States. The set up is simple: take three (or more) bands, squeeze them on stage together, and have them take turns playing songs. Members from other bands can dip in and out as they see fit, fostering a collaborative atmosphere that falls somewhere between Concert For Bangladesh-style indulgence and genuine inspiration. Dan Deacon has tried a few of these tours already, but when it was announced that he was going to test out the format with Deerhunter and No Age on board, complete with a huge free outdoor show in Brooklyn, it felt like the round robin concept had really arrived.

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