D.L. Anderson

That's ee-vayr to you, Nicki Minaj.

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.

Greetings to you four from Bloomington, Indiana, a happening college town perhaps one or more of you have flown over at some point. It's the birthplace of Hoagy Carmichael and David Lee Roth, and the home of John Mellencamp and Jagjaguwar Records, a label which this year released an album called Bon Iver, Bon Iver that you may have heard of. Most critics liked it, some liked it a lot, Rosie O'Donnell wanted more, pop lovers and rockists alike united to sneer at the smoothness of his album's textures and its ostensibly outré signifiers (I prefer the first album, but am a sucker for the Bruce Hornsby vibes of "Beth/Rest"). At the time of writing, 317,375 music fans have purchased it—40,000 more than Fleet Foxes, 40,000 less than LMFAO. Yet once the album was nominated for several Grammys last month, lots of people microcasted their ignorance of this album on Twitter. Quickly, another person culled this proudly professed ignorance into a Tumblr called "Who Is Bon Iver?" A member of a long-dormant Australian DJ concern accused him of "selling out" for lending his increased profile to something so horrifying as a whiskey concern, even though the accuser's own group hypocritically endorses deadly mountain calamities.

So what happened? Did the Bro From Eau Claire break through, or is he still a secret? If you follow music on the internet with any regularity, you couldn't go a day without hearing about him, but if you don't, there's a good chance you don't have any idea how to pronounce the name, and wait, the white guy from Kanye's album made his own album and everyone loves it apparently? To Twitter! It's clear why Bon Iver in 2011, just like Arcade Fire in 2010, made ripples critically, popularly, and awardishly—they fit long-established rock tropes into a modern, gently hip, and well-executed form. And it's also clear that this is happening at a point when with very few exceptions, good weird rock music is the last thing you expect to hear released by a music label owned by a multinational corporation.

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MTV turns 30 today. To celebrate, we're running a bunch of pieces on the channel, its legacy, and its future.

via Tacky and Kitsch

Send a self-addressed stamped envelope to the above address, and you could have your own Dial Sticker.

The first 59 minutes of MTV—12:01 a.m. to 1 a.m., exactly 30 years ago today—totally sucked. Not because the upstart cable network opened with the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" (which still rules), or because of the clip for Pat Benetar's "You Better Run" that came a few minutes later (ditto). Not because of the affably bland ex-WPLJ DJ Mark Goodman, or how the ads for Mountain Dew, Trapper Keepers, or Dolby sound didn't hit their targets, either. That first hour—which you can watch right here—sucked because nothing made any sense. "All the V.J. segments were out of sequence," founder Bob Pittman later remembered. "They would say, 'That was,' and it wasn't, and 'Coming up is,' and it wasn't coming up. The polarization on the wires was also switched, so if you were listening in stereo, it was fine, but if you were in mono, it was canceling the sound out."

Pittman and the rest of the first MTV staff could be excused for screwing up their first hour of TV (only a handful of cable subscribers in northern New Jersey were watching anyway—even the founders had to head to a Fort Lee sports bar to tune in). These were mostly radio people, after all, trying to find a way to make some money in the fledgling realm of cable television. They picked a good time: the music industry was seeking any strategy to reenergize itself in the midst of a multi-year slump after disco flamed out. Like so many startups that aimed to merge existing ways of doing things, MTV was a kludge in its earliest years, but at the same time it was also a quiet miracle of technological convergence. Venture capitalists and tech geeks take note: MTV was the 1980s' most killer music app.

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NB: This is not how bloggers generally dress.

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Duplass brothers—the siblings behind last year's cutesy indie Cyrus—were shopping a script for a thriller in which the mother of a recently deceased indie rocker seeks vengeance on a blogger who had snarked in her kid's general direction. The brothers are hoping to get Susan Sarandon for the mom role and Cyrus Jonah Hill to play the blogger, but the really important name is the one of the site where the mean mau-mauing appeared: Pitchfork. Since the brothers have already stolen my idea, I might as well show you some of the "indie thriller" treatments I'd been working on:

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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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For a brief moment in late 2008, it felt like the clouds were parting after eight dark years, and TV on the Radio's supremely great "Golden Age" might just be heralding the start of something truly amazing. The band went all in, leaving any arty pretension to the music video and earnestly proclaiming that, holy shit, positivity and patience might just pay off.

Well, that certainly didn't last long, did it? Though it might have felt in a tiny way like Blue America's own "Winds of Change," even Kyp Malone himself was dubious. "I just voted for a dude who supports wiretapping," he told Spin in early 2009, "because that was the best option."

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I've been watching and re-watching Janelle Monáe's video for ArchAndroid first single "Tightrope" for a few months now, and though I've come up with lots of other music-related stuff to talk and think about since, it's stuck with me. Firmly. Not for Gaga reasons, either--it's not nine minutes long or laden with haute couture and mind-numbing identity politics--the "Tightrope" clip is weird and memorable primarily for pulling from much more easily identifiable source material. More crucially, however, it's the ever-so-gently-strange way that Monae and her asylum of tights-and-tux-wearing tightrope walkers present this song, and its attendant mythology. Because pop concepts are most often inherently batshit chimeras--and that's what makes them brilliant and fun to explore--I want to try and figure out exactly what's going on here. Wish me luck.

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Vocal exercises. Of course.

Drake's first LP, Thank Me Later, just sold 446,680 copies its first week of release. An album that big should start some rather polarizing conversations: On the "pro" side of the Drake debate, among others, was SOTC's own Zach Baron, who passionately defended Aubrey Graham against many detractors. Out of that response came several responses, including, ahem, my own, having been rubbed the incorrect way by the mirror-within-a-mirror nature of Drake's lyrics. Even in a genre in which the tautological maxim "I'm Me" is acceptable as biographical logic, there just wasn't any there there below Later's meta-commentary on Drake's own rise to stardom. But if I'm right--if the record is a technically virtuosic yet depthless manifesto of the new-reality rap dream, then a behind-the-scenes MTV documentary about the lead-up to Later's release has the capacity to be very entertaining.

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One thing rings very true after reading Gary Shteyngart's GQ profile of M.I.A.: Neither the magazine nor the interviewer had any interest in giving her the Hirschberg, as it were. Gary Shteyngart--the much-lauded young writer releasing his third novel next month--brings up Maya's relationship to her food, but this ain't no truffle fry. "She refuses to buy the restaurant's pickles, curry paste, and cashews because they come from Sri Lanka," he notes of one lunch they shared, but he just presents these moments -- he doesn't tacitly judge them.

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Profoundly disturbing image by Camille Dodero

Today, Billboard reported that everyone's favorite accordion-playing pop-culture parodist, "Weird Al" Yankovic, is nine songs deep into his follow-up to 2006's Straight Outta Lynwood, and is possibly seeking inspiration from the current queen of the pop charts. We're no slouches when it comes to Lady Gaga fandom or horrifying puns as song titles, so we thought we'd help Al through his creative process a bit.  We're still working on turning "Alejandro" into "Don't Tase Me, Bro," but for the time being, here are our three best submissions.

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If you follow a band as slavish to style as Interpol, you've got to expect the quartet to surf art-world tides as effectively and dramatically as their music, well, doesn't. To wit: the move from the stark three-color minimalism of the Antics cover image to the bold, three-animal maximalism of Capitol debut Our Love to Admire (the work of noted high-art fauna photog Seth Smoot). Nothing to do with consistency, in other words, and everything to do with cultural currency. And now, while the cover of the quartet's forthcoming eponymous LP reverts back to stark, single-word brand management, the video for first single "Lights" errs more in the gooey, sci-fi direction of Matthew Barney.

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