Nicola Roberts, having herself a lucky day with the Village Voice.

​Sound of the City's year-end roundtable, with contributions from Tom Ewing, Eric Harvey, Maura Johnston, Nick Murray, and Katherine St. Asaph, continues. Follow along here.

Hey all. Again, thanks to Maura for putting this together, and thanks to Katherine for not only writing another outstanding recap of 2011 but also handing off to me no less topics than Bon Iver, PBR&B, K-Pop, all hip-hop, the cloud, and trollgaze. Where should I start?

Not with trollgaze, but we'll get there, for better or for worse. How about Nicola Roberts? I completely agree with you on that record, Tom, and I know from conversation that Maura and Katherine do too. (Eric?) I'd imagine that my experience with it was pretty common: Blown away by the singles, and by the fact that Cinderella's Eyes was almost a Girls Aloud album, it took me a while to allow it to develop into much more than that. I still enjoyed it plenty—amid the worst year for music ever, how could you not?—but not as much as I did once I started paying closer attention to its latter half.

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Don't get spun out—eat spun sugar instead!

​2011 has been the year of "trollgaze," a media-agnostic genre name for those pieces of pop culture as designed for maximum Internet attention as they are pieces of art that can stand (or at least wobble) on their own. The ways to get inducted into the trollgaze pantheon are as plentiful as self-congratulatory Lil B retweets; in music alone, they can involve dropping songs chock-full of easy ways to laugh at them (extra points if you're being dead serious about doing so), acting like an entitled punkass brat, complaining about people saying that you're acting like an e.p.b., or somewhat ineptly playing on the already-existent prejudices possessed by critical-mass online audiences, among other things. With so many things these days vying for the masses' increasingly divided attention, though, it's becoming tougher and tougher to gauge whether or not a piece of cultural ephemera is actually trying to double as its social-media strategy.

To help all the overwhelmed online music consumers out there figure out if a piece of music is trollgaze or not—it's kind of difficult!—Sound of the City is establishing The Trollgaze Index, a scientific method by which we deduce just how hard musicians are trying to play their listeners for the fool. We'll measure on a 50-point scale; a score of 35 or more means that, yes, if you're paying attention to the video or the song or the "viral" campaign, you—and we—have been trolled. Installment one (from, appropriately enough, an Odd Future-affiliated act that calls itself "The Internet") after the jump.

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​New York City rappers have been cast as something of the rap world's whipping boys for more than a few years now. Not only is it fashionable to paint the city's scene as still stuck in the '90s—that's, er, despite the man who effectively runs rap, old man Jay-Z, being pretty proud to hail from Brooklyn—even sympathetic profiles of the city's up-and-comers feel the need to ponder whether the MCs in question can break some sort of curse of the five boroughs. But this way of thinking is bunkum at best, and a cliché at worst.

But those people who've even casually cocked their ears toward the underground know that NYC rap has been doing just fine of late; a unified scene and a common vision have been slowly forming. Radio warrior Peter Rosenberg's first installment in the What's Poppin' mixtape series might not be an outright statement of hometown health, but with over half of the tape's 23 tracks showcasing artists who call NYC home, it's a timely reminder of the scene's promise.

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​Last night's South Park was in large part about the fad/scourge of Tween Wave, a new genre that horrified parents and mobilized kids all across the country. Dubbed as such because it would be the Next Big Thing from 2009 through 2012, it made the phrase "this sounds like shit" quite literal; it basically sounded like someone (or, shudder, multiple people) with really bad indigestion letting the world know about their digestive tract's problems over sorta-dubsteppish beats. But what musical subculture was the episode really making fun of? A clip, and some theories, below.

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​The new New Yorker contains Yet Another Story On Odd Future, although Kelefa Sanneh's piece outstrips its many bibliographic counterparts thanks to its particular focus on the LA hip-hop collective's most sloganeered member, Earl Sweatshirt. The 8,000-word piece, which took nine months of gestation and research to complete (oh, those media outlets that don't work on blog time!), contains interviews with Earl's father (the South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile), mother (who does not want to be identified) and the M.I.A. rapper, real name Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, himself.

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Our panel of music experts has proven themselves less-than-expert on any number of legendary subjects--Metallica, The Clash, Boyz II Men, pretty much anything that doesn't have a Lindsey Buckingham guitar solo in it. So we thought we'd test their knowledge about current events. You can't click on any piece of rock criticism this month without seeing the words "Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All." (Seriously, even the NPR review of the Paul Simon record might have stuck in the phrase "totally fucking swag.") There's a lot of chatter about these skateboarding, shouting, swearing, slur-tossing, syllable-flipping, stage-diving sociopaths--but do we really know who they're talking about? We asked 15 music critics:

How many of the 11 members of Odd Future can you name?

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Via @FuckTyler, less than three hours before his last-minute Goblin-release day show, with accompanying arrest photo (posted below). PR move or legit arrest? Read Eric Harvey's piece on Goblin while the Internet waits to find out.

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​For an album so undeniably 2011, Tyler, the Creator's Goblin sure starts off sounding a lot like 1993. The first words we hear him spit on Goblin are "I'm not a fuckin' role model"--a slightly altered version of Charles Barkley's notorious Nike commercial from Clinton's first year in office, as well as the driving discourse of Tupac Shakur's fiery second album Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.

It's a strangely out of time way for Tyler to introduce himself, and it's not a look the fashion-conscious 20-year-old wears particularly well. In part, that's because the censorship battles accompanying rap's extended entrance into American pop culture seem quaint in 2011. But it's also because Tyler's fighting a handful of well-intentioned people who chatter about music (including yours truly) who are uneasy about gleefully granting Next Big Thing status to a kid with a Tumblr and fantasies about punching pregnant women.

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The sleuths over at Complex claim to have found Earl Sweatshirt, Odd Future's most elusive member. By employing investigative tactics that involve lots of Facebook browsing, the magazine has deduced that Earl is (or was at some point) in Samoa, at a program for at-risk teenage boys called Coral Reef Academy. While the article admits that his current whereabouts are unknown (they suspect that he could already be back in L.A.), this is still a bit of a Holy Grail for OFWGKTA fans who have been chanting "FREE EARL" for the better part of a year.

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Swag?

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The much-blogged-about outfit Odd Future, a.k.a. OFWGKTA, its bringing its live show to the East Coast this May, as announced today via official Tumblr. The collective's NYC stop will be at Highline Ballroom on Friday, May 13 (appropriate); tickets went on sale earlier today and are already sold out. The mind begins to wander when thinking of what people will do in order to score entry to the show (non-money-exchange division). Eat a roach? Go up to Tyler and call his music "horrorcore"?

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