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Other Music on Record Store Day 2008.

Last week a ton of stories about Record Store Day percolated through blogs—Feistodon! The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends! St. Vincent! Beach House! Holy crap, you gotta get on line at 8 a.m. to get the best picks! On Friday, when I got an email from a store that contained both a list of records and detailed rules about how to make purchases, and I imagined standing on a sidewalk for an hour just to frantically paw through stacks of records hoping that one magical 7" would still be there, it hit me: I hate Record Store Day.

Record Store Day is a yearly event that happens on the third Saturday of April, and in the five years of its existence it's grown into a global thing. Record stores have all-day sales and maybe live performances or DJs, and they encourage people to come in and drop a healthy amount of cash on physical copies of music. One of the elements of the day that most appeals to collectors is the release of limited-edition records, whether they contain exclusive non-album tracks, or are special versions of some sort.

I appreciate that RSD has become a huge deal for independent record stores. It's true that it can help out smaller shops' second-quarter bottom line, driving customer traffic into stores and loosening up people's wallets to actually buy music in a way not unlike that time you had a few too many whiskeys and opened iTunes when you got home from the bar. I've gone to Other Music in the past, and last year I took advantage of Black Gold's "hey, here's some stuff we haven't priced yet for $1 an LP—have at it!"

But the exclusives kill me.

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The first time I saw Van Halen perform live, the band was colloquially known as Van Hagar. Guitarist Eddie Van Halen, drummer Alex Van Halen, and bassist Michael Anthony had just reunited with their second frontman Sammy Hagar to promote a greatest-hits package titled Best of Both Worlds; I bought floor seats about ten rows back from the Meadowlands stage and in a direct line of sight of Eddie's quicksilver fingers from a guy with connections. Having been a Van Hagar fan for quite some time, that night was a thrilling culmination to all those adolescent years spent in my bedroom air guitaring, air drumming, and (yes) air bassing. I commemorated the evening by buying a bootleg t-shirt in the parking lot.

Eight years later, I stood in Madison Square Garden for yet another Van Halen live performance, except this time, the once even-more-estranged frontman David Lee Roth was handling vocal duties. The foursome, experts on the art of Reunion, were back together in support of an album of new (well, sort of) material titled A Different Kind of Truth. As anyone who is still paying attention to the band will admit, it's a return to form, bluesy and bombastic, debauched and lecherous, vintage sounding and also hopelessly dated. New songs like "She's The Woman" and "Tattoo" fit seamlessly into the set list, which featured staples like "You Really Got Me," "Jump," and "Dance the Night Away." Rock and roll, mission accomplished.

But while I had a drunkenly exceptional time, thanks in part to the Garden's newly instituted 1:1 bartender-to-ticketholder ratio, during Roth's improvised "Panama" banter, I realized something that I had always suspected, but never felt truly comfortable saying aloud.

I'm just more of a Van Hagar guy.

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XXL's Freshman Issue cover. Click to enlarge.

As traditions go, XXL's annual "Freshman Class" issue is neither all that time-honored or worthwhile. The magazine's been putting rappers it calls freshmen on its cover since 2008, but hasn't exactly been kingmaking or future forecasting in doing so: 2008's list featured Crooked I and Joell Ortiz, half of what would become Slaughterhouse, now doing hyper-lyrical rap over araabMUSIK beats; Rich Boy, who all but disappeared after the success of "Throw Some D's"; Lil Boosie, who has caught more charges than he has released albums since; Papoose, last seen insisting to deaf ears on Twitter that he is the reigning king of New York; Lupe Fiasco, who broke through with 2011's watered-down Lasers, an album he hates; Saigon, who was Jay Electronica before Jay Electronica and dropped a long-gestating solo debut in 2011; Young Dro, a T.I. lieutenant who never blew up; Plies, now a workmanlike Florida street rapper; and Gorilla Zoe, known to most beyond the Cocaine Blunts corner of the Internet only as a guy who was on Yung Joc's "Coffee Shop."

The predictive value of the list hasn't improved since, with abundant misses (2009's Charles Hamilton and Cory Gunz, 2010's OJ da Juiceman and Pill, 2011's Lil Twist and Fred tha Godson), premature calls (B.o.B was a freshman in 2009, but blew up in 2010; Curren$y and Wale showed up on 2009's list, and Big Sean and J. Cole got the look in 2010, but none of the three found their niches until 2011), and just a few right name, right time selections (Kid Cudi in 2009, Meek Mill and Kendrick Lamar in 2011). And worse still, for some, are the out-and-out whiffs: where was XXL on Drake and Nicki Minaj, two of rap's biggest rising stars of the last three years?

But that doesn't make it a bad list, or a bad exercise; it just makes it Sisyphean. And that's part of why the XXL list will be with us, good or bad, for as long as the magazine exists. Here are five more reasons why the magazine will keep publishing it—and why we'll keep lapping it up.

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Last night, Rihanna and Chris Brown leaked two collaborations, a remix of her dessert-fetish track "Birthday Cake" and a rework of his Generic Club Banger No. 86 "Turn Up The Music." The releases inspired much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, but how do they fit into the pantheon of trollgaze? A subjective yet scientific analysis below.

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This morning Chuck Klosterman took to his perch at the ESPN-gone-McSweeney's site Grantland and tried to figure out why tUnE-yArDs' w h o k i l l, a record that he wasn't familiar with (but, he noted, that was loved by his wife), won this year's Pazz & Jop albums poll. He gave the album a listen, wondered about what Merrill Garbus might have on her mind, and asserted that she "must validate other people's belief in her own brilliance" in order to live up to her win this year. The piece was a bit "Old Man Yells At Cloud That He Seems To Find Gender-Ambiguous," to be honest, complete with confused Wikipedia citations, notes about its "superficially indecipherable lyrics," and so on. There are also attempts to play pundit as far as her future success, with this perhaps being the most eyebrow-raising: "Garbus will end up with this bizarre 40-year-old life, where her singular claim to fame will be future people saying things like, 'Hey, remember that one winter when we all thought tUnE-yArDs was supposed to be brilliant? That fucking puppeteer? Were we all high at the same time? What was wrong with us?'" Sigh.

Most frustrating about the piece, written by one of the country's most celebrated music writers on a high-trafficked platform: It seems to have been the result of a listening session or two in a vacuum, with only Wikipedia and a couple of preconceived notions about Garbus being kind of "out there" as research assistance. To that end, I'd like to provide a couple of reading suggestions for those still confused by what tUnE-yArDs might be about. I'm not saying, "You have to like this record." I do, but I also know that it's pretty divisive—if you look at the numbers, it won on passion as much as it won on number of votes! Rather, I just want to provide a bibliography of sorts, especially since claiming that one is engaging with an album (or, really, any artistic product) while refusing to do so in actuality is really not all that good of a look.

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You might have heard that the much-discussed singer Lana Del Rey had her U.S. television debut this past weekend on Saturday Night Live, and that the hive mind of public opinion declared that her performances, of "Video Games" and "Blue Jeans" did not go well. The satirical indie-chronicle Hipster Runoff's declaration that she "effing TANK[ED]" was echoed by even the most opinion-averse media outlets, with even the publicist-friendly Us wondering if she "bomb[ed]."

While the two performances were low-energy and marked by Del Rey attempting to rein in her voice and seeming not entirely sure of what to do with her corporeal self more than anything else, they didn't seem that much different than her first TV appearance when she performed "Games" on the UK television show Later With Jools Holland back in October. Still, even some who were on the Lana Del Train in the autumn seemed to be taken aback by Saturday's display, resulting in a Great Big Pile On Lana that seemed more intense and widespread than the ones that have occurred any other time her name was mentioned since "Video Games"'s YouTube debut. What happened?

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You may have heard that Rick Perry's mind-meltingly horrible anti-gay campaign ad has more dislikes on YouTube than Rebecca Black's "Friday." The story has been covered by Time, the Today Show, and the Huffington Post, among many others. There's only one problem: that's not actually true. The current version of "Friday" has only been online since September, even though the Internet's interest in the song clearly dates back to March. That's because the original YouTube upload of the clip was removed in an aborted attempt to put it behind a paywall; when that didn't work, "Friday"'s creators re-upped the original clip, thus resetting the counter on views and dislikes. That current version, it's true, only has some 250k+ dislikes, less than Perry's now-400k+ figure. But before it was taken down, the original upload had more than three million dislikes, far outstripping what Perry's video has accumulated. (Some outlets got it even more wrong, trying to claim that passing Black's video made Perry's the most-disliked in YouTube history, even though two Justin Bieber clips and Black's other video have far more dislikes than Perry's.)

While some outlets have issued corrections, the "fact" has gone viral, leaving the more interesting question of why, exactly, it's important that Perry is more disliked than Black (or Bieber). On one level, of course, it's just good news for liberals, a nice confirmation that their repulsed reaction to Perry's ad is shared by lots of others. But it belies a deeper anxiety about the relationship between politics and entertainment. In the last few years, YouTube has taken a weirdly major role in our political campaigns, serving as the central clearinghouse of everything from campaign ads like Perry's to major campaign speeches, career-ending gaffes, and even presidential debates, to say nothing of all the reaction videos and remixes voters produce.

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D.L. Anderson

Aw, why so glum?

Tonight's Grammy nomination concert, airing at 10 p.m. on CBS, will not only jam-pack a bunch of performances by the likes of Lady Gaga and Jason Aldean into its 60 minutes, it'll also let us know which artists will be prostrating themselves in front of the globe and thanking their families and God during next February's awards ceremony. Sure, Adele not getting as many nominations as humanly possible for her much-beloved, best-selling 21 is probably the most shocking development that can transpire this evening, but there are other questions afoot, too. Will the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences allow Taylor Swift to look surprised again and nominate Speak Now for multiple awards? Will Kanye West get honored for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy a year after it was greeted by nearly across-the-board critical love? Will the ambition all over Lady Gaga's Born This Way pay off in nominations? And is Bon Iver, currently racking up the "Best Album Of 2011" laurels from the likes of Paste, slated to rep for "indie" next February a la the Arcade Fire this year? Nick Murray and I answer these questions, and offer our picks for the Big Four categories' nomination slates, below.

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via Facebook

During the Nickelback brouhaha that took over parts of the Internet earlier this month, one of the common refrains against having the Canadian band perform at the halftime show of the Thanksgiving Day showdown between the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions involved the selection's implicit slap in the face to Detroit. The city, after all, has been the birthplace of so much great music, particularly that which emanated from Motown—and to honor that legacy with a performance by Canadian arena-rockers seemed like a slap in the face. NYC-based pianist Scott Bradlee got Solomonic and decided to split the difference, reworking Nickelback's signature hit into a soul barnburner and releasing the end result, "A Motown Tribute To Nickelback," in time for Thursday's halftime show. It's not too surprising, since he's also masterminded a gypsy-jazz rework of Weezer's "Hash Pipe" and retrofitted Rebecca Black's "Friday" into an old-time weekend lament—but the end product did raise the eyebrows of people who had assumed that Nickelback's sanctioned crappiness meant that all their songs were completely without merit as well. We emailed with him about his inspiration for the cover, his thoughts on the song, and whether or not five words can actually scream, "Are we having fun yet?"

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via Fox

No word on how many petition signers were in this section of the crowd.

Thursday was not only a day for Americans to get together and indulge in pie and for Lady Gaga to indulge in some ego-stroking; it was the culmination of the Great Anti-Nickelback Movement that gripped the country this month, the day that the embattled band of Canadian brothers would unite as one on the Ford Field gridiron during halftime at the game between the Green Bay Packers and the hometown Detroit Lions. They'd finally, after so many days of sniping and LOLing, face down all those people who sneered at them and signed petitions against them and clicked "dislike" on their YouTube videos in a show of anti-yarling sentiment. So how'd they do? Well, the band may have been tepidly received at first, but all in all they did better than the Lions that afternoon. (Perhaps the home team could have used some interpretive dancers to bolster their on-field performance? At the very least, they might have calmed down Ndamukong Suh a bit!)

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