We actually saw the Jessica Cutler thing bright and early this morning (as did other bloggers of our acquaintance — man, some of you get up way too early), but our mind refused to process the story. Mostly because we were hot on the trail of what had to be the craziest thing we’d ever heard: NPR music reviews are hip. We understand your shock, and suggest you sit down and put your head between your knees. We cannot comment on the inscrutable part of the story because we have this weird habit of only half-listening to NPR (after a while, it all sounds the same), but, please, reviewing Wilco is hip? It’s 2004. Morrissey? So uncool. Magnetic Fields? Okay, maybe we’ll give him that one (and we do agree on the Timberlake/Timbaland problem — we had the same issue with The Church, The Lords of the New Church, and New Order way back in the day). Thankfully Salon righted our little world by printing (posting? publishing? what vocabulary is appropriate these days?) an homage to Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade. Not long thereafter, our radio station played “Makes No Sense At All” — we decided that was our theme today.
- Hip, But Inscrutable: Music Reviews on NPR
- Now and Zen
