The '90s were, by most acounts, a great time to be American or British—dot coms and economic prosperity and rising tides blurring (urg) the disparity between haves and have nots, making even slacker jobs—say, civil service—relatively comfortable and attractive and bohemian; everyone could enjoy the bank holiday together. The guy who turned me on to Blur along with a host of other bands in the '90s, something of a mentor, seemed to perfectly exemplify this type: He worked a slacker job, had a great apartment on Capitol Hill, sported an Artists for a Work-Free America t-shirt and meant it, and just generally seemed like a man of leisure. And men of leisure need leisure rock like Blur. But it's hard to maintain a life of leisure in a great depression, and while we might get a lot of blistering punk rock in the coming years (or, shit, fingers crossed some green public works really will solve employment and environmental problems in one fell swoop), what will happen to the leisure rock of the world? Sure, the actually privileged leisure class may continue to make the stuff, but so what if us proles can't actually enjoy it? And what then to make of all this Blur reunion talk?

Of course, no Smiths compilation is perfect. But, if you're building your own best of, what absolutely must be included, and what absolutely must be omitted? I'll get things rolling: "Cemetery Gates" must appear; "Meat is Murder" must not.

Another mystery solved. Damn, that feels good.

Kaliss put in a lot of legwork for this bio, interviewing record-biz figures, band members from the Family Stone and the Viscaynes (Sly’s pre-Family Stone outfit), and documenting the early years of Sylvester Stewart’s life and his family lineage.

Rich Freedman of the Bay Area-based Times-Herald interviewed Kaliss, and the following passage surprised, with its J.D. Salinger-like sense of a genius working in seclusion, generating great quantities of work that nobody’s seen or heard for decades.

Sly continues to write and, eventually, produce and perform, Kaliss said, adding that the Grammy winner has "loads" of music left in him.

"He keeps doing it. He stays up to 3, 4 in the morning just writing," Kaliss said. "He's been doing that all along. But we haven't gotten to hear much of it yet. Even when he's stayed hidden, he's kept going."

One has to wonder: Wouldn’t a label kill to release some new Sly Stone material? Or why doesn’t Sly release it himself? Or have Prince do the honors? Could it be that… this new music isn’t very good? Hmmm…

Now please enjoy one of the greatest pieces of music ever conceived. “Stand” possesses one of the most satisfying, gradual builds in pop-music history and the final minute of it represents the most electrifying, despair-obliterating coda ever.

Last week, I was in NYC. I walked by Other Music, Victory Records, various little vinyl boutiques, and while, on some abstract level, I wanted to support all these businesses, I didn't come home with a single record. At my kind host's stylish but small railroad apartment, we listened to music on a nice set of speakers plugged into mp3 players and laptops. They had maybe two boxes of records. I can't remember whether or not they had a turntable set up (I don't think so).

At home, I have the same brand of shelving as every other vinyl owning young person, the one made out of 16 squares perfectly sized for 12"s (your model may have 25 squares if you're fancy). It's half full of vinyl, half full of books and other media. I have a few crates worth of records on additional shelving or in actual crates on the floor, but I'm lately convinced that I'm never going to fill the rest of this shelf up with vinyl, let alone have to someday spring for the 25 square model.

I find no joy in this conclusion. I would love to live in a house lined with shelves of records. I would prefer my living room to look like these. I just don't think it's going to happen.

Vinyl is relatively big and heavy. Airlines are charging for extra baggage, and even when they weren't, traveling with vinyl (say, enough to DJ with) is grueling compared to traveling with mp3s or even CDs. Shipping is apparently a drag as well. Apartment space for record shelving is limited.

Music is expensive. We're diving headlong into what looks to my admittedly not economically expert eyes like a serious recession/depression, and records just aren't a necessity as much as food and shelter (Segal will likely debate this point with me). Rising fuel prices only aggravate the flying/shipping issues as well. As much as I want to support these small business and be a parton of artists, I just can't give any more than I can afford. Before this job, that meant buying records as carefully as possible, downloading what I couldn't afford to buy, and supporting artists at shows and by buying other merch. Now, it frequently means building my collection through promotional copies. Both means meant more CDs and mp3s than vinyl making their way into my collection. Morgan Geist might complain that I'm not listening to his records on the proper hi-fi setup in the ideal format, but audiophile gear is a luxury that most music fans probably can't afford. Hell, even Sasha Frere-Jones is selling his record collection.

These are gloomy, doomy times—every time someone in New York asked me how work was going, I would reply that it's great, the music business is tanking, print journalism is tanking, so print music journalism is the most exciting place you could hope to be. In seriousness, it's an awesome job, I feel fortunate every day to have it, but I'm not sure it'll ever launch me comfortably into the middle class. I think I may never own a home; maybe I won't be able to hold on to all the music I love for posterity either. Maybe formats—or other, larger paradigms—will shift and force people of my class situation to leave certain things behind. I think record collections, as opposed to mp3 collections, will only become increasingly a thing of class privilege rather than of ardent music fandom (I suppose it was always this way; perhaps music fans of less means have just moved from dubbed cassettes to mp3s).

Sacrilege, maybe, but as much as I love the look and feel of vinyl, records are only of marginally more value to me than the equivalent mp3s. Or: If I have to, I can let record collecting go. At least it'll be easier to move when rising rent finally prices me out my current place.

Music and drugs have a long and intertwining history. Certain artists have their poisons and certain poisons have their artists. Fans too, poisons don’t miss them either. (Managers, promoters, bookers, and label reps, let’s not forget they do drugs too.) We as music makers and fans snort, smoke, shoot, chug, and inject, for many reasons.

Enhancement of the senses to intensify creative process? Check. Enhancement of the senses to intensify audible and visual experience? Check. R. Kelly says, “I believe I can fly” and we do too. Or if you’re from the South, you want drugs because you like how it feels going fast.

Eddy Grant rocks down to Electric Avenue then does what? He takes it highya. Sadly, ginseng and guarana don’t stack up. I mean, there you are on Electric Avenue, somehow a cup of ginseng tea doesn’t work.

Drugs get ugly real quick. Some of the nastiest and dumbest:

The Speedball: intravenous use of heroin or morphine and cocaine.
Crank: cheap form of meth that is usually snorted.
Lith: lithium taken from batteries, comes in a paste, usually smoked.
LSD/Mushroom/Ecstasy combo: college students in Georgia call it “The Larry”.
Freon: the shit in refrigerators and air conditioners.
Yard of Beer: three feet of liquid beer.

Which gets you the highest?

Photos after the jump...

...but I've spent the past 24 hours listening to nothing but Rubber Soul and I can attest unequivocally and for all time that it is 30 times better than this album and 16 times better than this album.

That is all.

Climb a mountain (what mountain?)
Swim a sea (what sea?)
See what I mean? (no?)
I don`t know but I don`t want to get too deep

Let's do it! Let's "get too deep." What is happening in this passage? The response to the rapper is that he sees a mountain and a sea, but this is the wrong response. It's not a matter of seeing a mountain and sea, but doing something on the mountain and in sea: in the first he is climbing; in the second he is swimming. So, when he says: "See what I mean?," this meaning has to do with doing something and not the thing that something is being done to. Deeper yet, this doing is not done in the world of objects but in the very opposite: a state of mind. Climbing, here, is an idea of climbing; swimming, an idea of swimming. And so what the rapper wants the other singers to grasp is the idea (or universal concept) of these activities. In conclusion, the rapper in the lovely (even heavenly) post-black elegance tune is a Platonist.

Also, is the Roots album Things Fall Apart based on Achebe's novel? Not sure. I've only heard it once.

That's all I could think of, then and now. There must be more. I'm missing something obvious, I can feel it. A little help ... anyone?

(Deep-ish thoughts below....)

Cosby commented on James Brown’s Black Caesar album saying:

It’s amazing, especially considering it is built of so-called JB 'filler' material (“The Boss” is a disposable b-side? Whoa.)

And "The Payback" was rejected by the makers of the movie “Hell Up in Harlem” for being not funky enough.

Thank you, Cosby. It goes to show that you can learn something new about James Brown every day. Like that some people back in the day didn’t think he was funky enough. That’s like saying water isn’t wet.

But it's the first thing I thought of when I woke up this morning—especially the image around 1:18 with the little Ugandan girl disappearing into herself as she dances.

I think it means I'm about to have a stroke.

THE MORTGAGE and housing market crisis has ensnared a lot of household names across the nation.

Now we can add a Seattle music icon to the list.

Jazz vocalist great Ernestine Anderson, who lives in the Central District, is in danger of losing her home, which is in foreclosure proceedings.

Friends and supporters citywide are trying to raise $45,000 by a June 30 deadline to prevent the 79-year-old woman's six-bedroom family home from being auctioned.

A scratchy recording of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music.

The songs were captured by the BBC in the Autumn of 1951 during a visit to the University of Manchester.

The recording has been unveiled as part of the 60th Anniversary of "Baby", the forerunner of all modern computers.

The tunes were played on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a commercial version of the Baby Machine.