Blog: Don't Fear the Mainstream

Avril Lavigne's 15 minutes were supposed to be up years ago, but here she is again, with another hit album, and insanely catchy single Girlfriend. Sure, the song is derivative (It's Hollaback Girl with guitars), but so what? It's time for everyone to grudgingly give Avril respect as one of the most successful pop artists of this decade. When her second album came out I thought for sure it was going to bomb, because times had changed and her skater punk style wasn't hot anymore, but the songs were just too good for it to bomb. You [...]

I was going to use this space to praise a certain music magazine's recent review of the new Bright Eyes album. I was going to link to it, and talk about how the opening line was brilliant, how it was so much better than anything I could've written, and how it made me journalistically insecure. But when I went to find said review on this magazine's website, it wasn't there. It's infuriating that some major music publications don't have their magazine content online. So instead I'm going to praise one of their competitors: Rolling Stone. RS takes [...]

The other day I came across Duran Duran's Rio video, while a copy of the Rolling Stone with Panic! At the Disco on the cover was sitting on my table, and it struck me that these two are EXACTLY THE SAME BAND. Of course this comparison has been made before, but I never realized just how accurate it was. Duran Duran was known as much for their sharp style, cool hair and good looks as for their catchy pop ditties, [...]

So after months of imagining this in my head, I've finally gotten around to starting the music blog. Ultimately I want this blog to be incorporated into my all-encompassing Pittsburgh local music site. We'll see if that materializes... I'll start off with the origin of the blog name. My litmus test for judging someone's musical open-mindedness is the "Ashlee Simpson test." See, I have some friends who are what I call indie snobs - they refuse to listen to anything mainstream and only like obscure Pitchfork shit. Of course I also like some of that [...]