Like, say, this one:

Here's what the always great Letters of Note has to say:

According to this illustrated letter to Seattle-based band Aerobic Death in 1984, Dave Grohl was compiling and selling mixtapes with his friends at the age of 15 — this particular compilation bearing the name "John Denver's Nightmare." Two years later, 17-year-old Grohl dropped out of school to become the drummer for punk band Scream. A few years after that, he was a member of Nirvana.

Dear seasoned Seattle punkers: Know anything about Aerobic Death (Beside that they had an excellent name)? Please share in the comments.

Image via Matador

Here's a story from network television about hip-hop from 1981 with a heap of classic footage as well a few dunderheaded quotes from the newscasters. ENJOY.

"Rap music, it's all beat and all talk! It tells you a story and makes you want to dance!"
"Right now, all around us, and so compelling you never miss the fact there's no melody..."

The footage of Kurtis Blow doing "The Breaks" is a mind blower, for sure. So much more great history here as well.

…A rail-tailed Negro named Michael Jackson sold more copies of a single album than any singer or instrumentalist in recorded history…a blind Negro named Stevie Wonder has earned more dollars than the most popular composers and instrumentalists in both jazz and European concert music…a horse-faced Negro from the South named Lionel Ritchie pulls down millions for songs that contain so little melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic character that even the most imaginative jazz musicians haven't tried to use them as bridges to a larger audience in the way they could when the best of Tin Pan Alley was in flower.

The good stuff starts at minute two:

"I'm glad you were home."

"I'm ALWAYS home! I'm uncool! The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone when you're uncool."

The continuing media... Watch the Today Show video clip, where Bush shows his softer side, forgiving Conway West for saying those terrible things...

To anyone who believes, because of ease of access to clips online, music writing is inconsequential, I defy you to read Ben Ratliff's New York Times piece on Salome, a sub-genre-crunching metal band from northern Virginia. In it, Ratliff not only offers not only a fine primer on metal's many forms and function, but puts Salome's personality fully into context.

I almost never listen to metal of any kind. This article made me.

The best metal of any kind feels like it comes from below and wants to pull you down there. “Terminal,” in its first track, “The Message,” rises slowly out of silence with underwater sounds: a sonar ping, twisted and looped until the sound degrades and decays. (The pings come back later in the record, as well, tying it together.) The loop speeds up and flies away over Rob Moore’s first guitar riff, two minutes into the song, uneven and heavy and simple and colored in by the drummer Aaron Deal’s short and hard-hitting fills. Then the band quiets down, creating a space, and Kat comes in with her caustic, electrocuted howl, one word per line:

Burning!

through!

Ignite!

Here she downshifts into her guttural voice. The lyric sheet says that the following words are “the visible,” but it sounds more like “eeugheeughawwwww.” In her deep voice the lyrics become completely obscured. When she does it live, she’s not pantomiming, not becoming a character; she becomes transparent, and music flows through her. Put it this way: It’s rare to see someone rock this way, top to bottom, inside and out. It doesn’t necessarily mean provoking your crowd or being an acrobat. It means giving yourself completely to your task.

Kat, 26, whose last name is Katz, grew up in McLean, Va., exploring but not fitting in with the metal scene in Virginia and Washington; in high school she admired Runhild Gammelsaeter, the striking Norwegian woman who sang in the doom band Thorr’s Hammer, and J. R. Hayes, the singer of the local Virginia grindcore band Pig Destroyer. She is a small woman, with small hands. (I bought some vinyl from her after a show; commanding onstage, she looked tiny behind the merchandise table.) She teaches yoga and takes physical therapy courses at a community college. She doesn’t drink or smoke. She doesn’t sing more than six songs in a row — about an hour, max. She says she thinks of her singing as part of her spiritual practice, though she is reluctant to talk about it. (There’s not a lot of spirituality in Salome’s corner of metal. In fact there’s a lot of anti-spirituality.) But she did anyway.

“When I sing, it allows me to be present,” she said in a phone interview. “I think of music as a way to connect. In yoga they believe that emotion is just energy, and if you raise your energy, you can get closer to reaching God.”

Read Ratliff's marvelous piece on Salome, and see if makes you take a listen to Terminal. The entire record is streaming on NPR.

And apparently NPR streams metal now. With a pledge $150 or more and you'll receive a Southern Lord coffee mug and a 100% hemp Slayer tote bag.

Seattle electronic artist Jon McMillion's self-titled debut for upstart label Nuearth Kitchen just got an 8.0 review in Pitchfork today from resident techno expert Philip Sherburne. A fine review, but two troubling trends:

1. The front page link to the review still refers to Seattle as "an unlikely locale" for electronic music.

2. Sherburne can't resist the low-hanging food metaphor lead: "If Seattle's Nuearth Kitchen were a restaurant, it would surely belong to the slow-food movement." (Of course, neither could Dave Segal, writing in an article titled Organically Cooking the Dancefloor: "McMillion's music comes across like a gourmet meal composed of the finest organic ingredients compared to the microwaved, fast-food DJ tools that many producers pump out.") All I'm saying is, Nuearth Kitchen better, ah, prep themselves for more of this sort of thing in the future.

Because comic-book Beyonce has the CRAZY EYES.

• Click to Enlarge

And she will eat you alive.

(Via Bleeding Cool.)