The biggest running joke is all of rock music, of course, has become the imminent release of the next Guns N’ Roses album, Chinese Democracy which is due to come out, either any day now or never. Even Syd Barrett was able to make a couple of solo albums after he went crazy, Axl.

However, Neil Young fans know that the wait for Chinese Democracy is nothing compared for how we’ve been waiting for Archives, the career-spanning box set that he’s been promising since — shit — Guns N’ Roses was just becoming the biggest band on the planet. We’ve been waiting for so long that his length of time that Archives can cover has actually doubled.

While some performance CDs have been released (the awesome Live at the Fillmore East and the not quite as awesome Live at Massey Hall, the bulk of the material assumed to be on Archives has only been available on bootlegs. Well, yesterday, Neil has made his latest announcement concerning Archives. The first 10 discs are coming out this fall. Whoo-hoo! On Blu-Ray. D’oh!

So despite the fact that I’ve been looking forward to this for nearly 20 years, right now I’m kinda disappointed.

Read the entire entry …

How I Met Your Mother is one of the three funniest shows on TV right now, along with The Office and 30 Rock. However, because it’s on the normally sucky CBS, it gets very little love and very little attention, except when they do things like stuntcast Britney Spears.

Sigh. They don’t need Britney, not when they have great comic actors like Neil Patrick Harris,Cobie Smulders, Josh Radnor, Alyson Hannigan and the absolutely awesome Jason Segel.

For the uninitiated, the framing device of the show is simple: in the year 2030 (still no flying cars, sadly), this guy Ted is telling his kids the story of how he met their Mother. That’s it: nearly every episode starts with a shot of highly uninterested teenage kids staring in the camera while a voiceover starts the week’s episode with a “Kids, let me tell you …), before flashing back to the present with that week’s part of the story of how he met their Mother.

Seems simple enough, but within that framing device lurks misdirections, fast-forwards, flashbacks, Rashomon-like POV changes, and, so far, no concrete idea of who The Mother actually is. And oh yeah, lots and lots and lots of great jokes.

At its best, it is, in a word, awe–

Read the entire entry …

Bravo, Bravo! You have finally done it! You have taken one of the best websites ever to grace the internet, and in just a little over space of a year, you have turned it into a garishly unusable pile of synergy-laden shit.

Awesome!!

When you took over TWOP last year, I said I wasn’t worried. Well, you showed me. Turns out, I’m a fracking idiot. Who knew that when I professed my love for this site after it had been one of my top destinations for years that it would all end so . . . badly. Well, I guess you did, huh, Bravo?

Read the entire entry …

Previously, on An Early History of R.E.M.: We have complex, life-long relationships with the bands we love . . . It’s a piece written in 1991 . . . R.E.M. is discovered via Trouser Press flexi-disc . . . Chronic Town was their first EP . . . Murmur becomes an obsession . . . The R.E.M. lyric-deciphering party . . . Later on came Reckoning . . . The great American rock underground coalesced . . . R.E.M. is the “acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff,” so they’re on a lot of TV shows . . . Interviewing Bill Berry . . . Fables of The Reconstruction of The Fables . . . R.E.M., back in Fresno . . . Their big rock albums . . . The long wait before Out of Time . . . How do you reconcile huge success, when you were originally a group of arty college-age bohos who somehow got world famous for doing exactly what you wanted to do?

And now, the exiting conclusion to An Early History of R.E.M.!!

Written in March, 1992. Published in Rotting America in Summer, 1992

It’s been almost a year since I first posed that question (which just goes to show you how things really work in the wild, wooly, unedited, and unpaid world of ‘zines), and since then R.E.M. have racked up the accolades for Out of Time. They have become the mainstream — winning MTV’s video awards, Rolling Stone’s readers poll, and even a Grammy for “Best Alternative Album.”

Read the entire entry …

Kassia is fond of saying that around ‘Loper HQ, April Fools isn’t a day, it’s a season. However, this year, real life has gotten in the way, so in honor of that, I’ve decided to point out a few actual real things that are far more absurd than most of the jokes you’ll see today.

Let’s begin, shall we.

• Continuing Record Company Cluelessness About the 21st Century
  Last week, there was an article in Entertainment Weekly about the rush-release of the new Gnarls Barkley album. Apparently, the fact that it leaked online a few weeks early caught Atlantic records by surprise.

Read the entire entry …

Previously, on An Early History of R.E.M.: We have complex, life-long relationships with the bands we love . . . It’s a piece written in 1991 . . . R.E.M. is discovered via Trouser Press flexi-disc . . . Chronic Town was their first EP . . . Murmur becomes an obsession . . . The R.E.M. lyric-deciphering party . . . Later on came Reckoning . . . The great American rock underground coalesced . . . R.E.M. is the “acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff,” so they’re on a lot of TV shows . . .

And now, Part 2, of An Early History of R.E.M.!!

Written in March, 1991. Published in Rotting America in March, 1992

Oh yeah, something else happened in that summer of 1984 . . . R.E.M. played in Fresno. At a club called the Star Palace. And my roommate Kirk and I got to interview them.

The Star Palace, at some point in its history, used to be an Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio, and now it’s a waste of space, but for about five or six years, it was the coolest place in town to see shows. Since it held four or five hundred people it was perfect for big underground bands, and through some act of the gods which I don’t remember anymore, in June of 1984, R.E.M. and the Dream Syndicate played there.

Read the entire entry …

People have complex relationships with the artists they love. With some artists, the love flares up and dies down almost as fast, never to be rekindled. But with others, that early flare-up settles into a life-long relationship, complete with the ups and downs of any other life-long relationship. For me, one of those artists is R.E.M. 20 years ago, they were probably my most favorite entity on the entire planet, but the post-Bill Berry years have been, er, problematic, and my ardor has cooled. However, they have a new album, Accelerate coming out in a couple of weeks, and I found a copy online and liked what I heard. So I thought that in the next couple of weeks, I would I would go back and republish a something I’ve previously written about them, and then, after the album comes out, look at how things are now. This early history was written for a Fresno ‘zine in 1991: the exact halfway point between when I fell in love with them and fell out of love with them. For better and worse, I haven’t changed a word.

Written in March, 1991. Published in Rotting America in March, 1992

If you’ve ever thought that R.E.M. has ever sold out, you are wrong, dead wrong. R.E.M. has always been one of the most uncompromising bands in rock n’ roll history. Those who have been yelling “sell out” since Lifes Rich Pageant (Fables? Reckoning?) are either A) idiots or B) so enamored of their own cloistered underground hipness and their attitude of “if is popular, it can’t be good,” that they’ve completely twisted into themselves and they wouldn’t know the real world if it came up and bit em in the ass. Or maybe not. That probably is a bit harsh, but R.E.M. has been the soundtrack to my life since I first heard the Trouser Press flexi-disc of “Wolves, Lower” in 1982 . . .

Read the entire entry …

Apparently, Lorne Michaels is worried that — because of a couple of cold opens spoofing the media’s kowtowing to Obama, Tina Fey’s funny but heartfelt “bitch is the new black” endorsement, and of course, an actual appearance by Mrs. Clinton her own self — people are perceiving Saturday Night Live as pro-Hillary.

This, naturally, brings up two related questions: 1) who still watches Saturday Night Live? 2) Are pro-Obama SNL viewers up in arms over the pro-Hillary bias?

My answers are: 1) me. 2) Not this one.

Read the entire entry …

I’d like to bid farewell to the HD-DVD format, which died a quick death this week. Was it any good?

You see, I was one of the millions of consumers who stayed on the sidelines while HD-DVD fought it out with Blu-Ray for high-definition digital supremacy. Because I knew that this day was inevitable, I stayed away from both formats. So I never actually saw an HD-DVD movie. Not even in a demonstration.

After all, I’d already lived through this movie once before: only it was called Beta vs. VHS. I watched while a lot of smart people got burnt by picking the wrong format, so I figured that I didn’t need to see the remake.

Read the entire entry …

I had so much fun last week doing my list of 50 Great Songs Over 7 Minutes Long That Didn’t Make Rolling Stone’s List that I figured I would do a sequel.

Caveats: for better and worse, this list wasn’t created by a group of people sitting in a room, but rather just one guy using his iTunes. It’s probably too short on hardcore and too long on funny songs. However, when putting it together, it struck me that wittiness is a factor in a great short song in the same way that groove is a factor in a great long song.

This time, I narrowed it down to a single song per artist. Some of these are even the best song that artist ever did! And like last time, it’s alphabetical by artist.

50 Great Songs Under 2 Minutes Long

Read the entire entry …