The duo, who arrived without so much as an introduction, greatly shifted Idolator's tone.

Johnston's approach to pop coverage was, to put it lightly, a little bit arch—she cut her American Idol coverage with a healthy dose of snark and wasn't afraid to piss off name-brand rockers. Robbie and Becky chose to take things in a different direction.

Needless to say, this has not gone over well. Some people just don't like them. Others have implied that they are, in fact, illiterate. Since then, Robbie and Becky have become the blog world's answer to Coy and Vance—much maligned replacements for a well-loved cast.

The criticism is not entirely unfounded, though. Some of their blog posts have been, to put it lightly, flummoxing. For instance:

"Following up with Danish cheeseballs Aqua releasing their Greatest Hits collection stateside and unveiling the surprisingly dark video for “My Mamma Said” comes news of the foursome’s new holiday jam, “Spin Me Your Christmas.”

Huh? Apparently, I'm not the only one who was confused. After grappling with the above post for a few minutes, I refreshed the page and found that some kindly editor had come along and re-worked the lede:

"It should hardly be a surprise that the artists who once dreamed up “Barbie Girl” still know how to merchandise. Along with the release of their Greatest Hits collection, Danish cheeseballs Aqua released a darkly buzzworthy video for “My Mamma Said” and now comes a nicely timed holiday jam, “Spin Me Your Christmas.” It’s like they somehow knew Christmas was coming."

Luckily, the originals are still out there! A few blog aggregators have, helpfully, preserved the posts as they were at first publication. I've gone ahead and A/B'ed a few examples after the jump:

Original Fallout Boy Lede:
"So Fall Out Boy is taking a break. Or maybe they aren’t, and it’s really just a sugar-coated break-up? They’re denying it’s nothing of the sort , so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, but in the meantime we have a few suggestions for how Pete, Patrick & Co. should invest their free time:"

Revision:
"So Fall Out Boy is taking a break. Or maybe they aren’t, and it’s really just a sugar-coated break-up? They’re denying it’s anything of the sort, so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, but in the meantime we have a few suggestions for how Pete, Patrick & Co. should invest their free time:"

Original Susan Boyle Lede:
"Noting that Britain’s Got Talent winner-turned-America’s-sweetheart Susan Boyle has found that her album just leaked might be a bit irrelevant. After all, judging by the stealth pre-order sales for I Dreamed A Dream, there probably isn’t anyone left who hasn’t already paid for the set of standards."

Revision:
"If an album leaks on the Internet, but everyone’s already pre-ordered it, does it make a sound? The upcoming debut of Britain’s Got Talent winner-turned-America’s-sweetheart Susan Boyle has made its way online. But judging from stealth pre-order sales for I Dreamed A Dream, there may not be many fans left who didn’t already pay for her collection."

Good morning, y'all! Top of the news pile has Maura Johnston leaving Idolator, and Ron Charles, aka, the muscle at Book World, getting his space in the Style section, goddamit. (For those of you who are not ravenously digesting R.C.'s every tweet: He nearly lost his slot in Style due to the insane number of inches required to review Sarah Palin's new Inuit romance novel, Pantsuits with Wolves.)

Strange ways to write a novel, Johnny Cash's love for Native Americans, the many manifestations of Watchmen, the best songs of the decade, and more, after the jump.

- Big news on the DVD front: Yet another "special edition" of Watchmen is being released, this time with just enough additional footage to give some nerd a boner-induced aneurysm while still barely registering with those of us who fell asleep in theaters (Guilty!). Bill Gibron of Pop Matters goes on ad nauseum about these DVD special features, and I can dig that. What I cannot dig–will not dig–is this nonsense: "[I]n a few short years, when critical opinion has been snatched away from the grinning maw of Geek Nation, Watchmen the movie will be viewed in a similar light as Watchmen the literary icon–as one of the most powerful, forward thinking, and visually stunning stories of the last 50 years." Look, Gibron, The Mothman Prophecies is one of my favorite movies–definitely somewhere in the top five–but I'm not gonna bullshit you: it sucks. For all her chops, Laura Linney can't even handle the part of a hick cop, and Richard Gere's underbite really gets away from him, oh, once every other scene; so frequently, in fact, that you want to hold his mouth still for him. All that aside, the movie appeals to a part of me that doesn't really give a damn about Richard Gere's teeth or that Laura Linney is insanely overrated; a part of me that loves wonder and mystery. You see where I'm going with this, Gibron? The Watchmen movie sucked, and that's coming from a guy who liked The Mothman Prophecies. Don't shit the shitbird.

- Justin M. Norton compiled a list of 10 essential grindcore albums. AxCx's 40 More Reasons to Hate Us didn't make the list and I don't know enough about the internal dialogue of the grindcore scene to tell you why. It really is a terrible album, and seeing as shittiness is grindcore's guiding aesthetic, I think AxCx may have been cheated for political reasons.

- WWJD? For instance, if he had been around during the enlightenment, would Jesus have endorsed the castration of little boys with pretty voices in order to keep the Backstreet Boys alive forever? The tradition of the castrati, writes Jan Swafford in Slate, "rose from an unholy trinity of religion, money, and art. The church forbade women to sing in services. There was a standing ban, enforced primarily in the Papal States, on teaching women to sing professionally at all. Church choirs were staffed by boys, castrati, and adult tenors and basses." The Papal States have been fucking boys for so long, you think they'd be better at getting away with it by now.

- In somewhat related news, "Engineered Rabbit Penises Raise Human Hopes." (Steve passed that one along; round of applause for Steve, everybody.)

- All Songs Considered (or, All "Indie Rock" Considered) has assembled "The Decade Defined," a look at the "defining moments and trends" of the early 2000s. Is it interesting? Meh. Media attention is how we determine what's important, right? But there's a hand guiding the media spotlight, and that hand is attached to the arm of an old person whose other arm/hand is clutching a ratings/traffic printout with a Skeletor-like grip. If a bunch of public radio people are getting together and saying, "This is what we talked about for the last 10 years, so clearly it defined the decade–oh hey! remember when the Silver Fox won American Idol? Shit yeah! 55 is the new no, i swear i'm not old enough to be your father," then I don't really know what's going on. On the other hand, I was addicted to Contemporary Christian Music and the sweet stylings of the Dave Matthews Band for the first half of this decade, so it's likely that I have never known what was going on. For a detailed list of the best of the decade/best of the year lists (that's right–a list to keep track of all the lists), you simply cannot beat Largehearted Boy's continually updated list.

- Richard Powers, whom Mark Athitakis recently called "America’s most Wallace-ian living writer," is weird. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Powers...wrote his last three novels while lying in bed, speaking to a lap-top computer with voice-recognition software." Based on my limited exposure to improvisational folk-ballad writing, speaking a entire novel sounds hard. Also, Junot Diaz writes his novels in the shitter.

- How many jobs do you have right now? Whatever number you just said to your monitor (psycho), Jesse Thorn has at least three more than that. He's got The Sound of Young America, Jordan, Jesse GO!, all those meet-ups and nerdcons and whatnot, and now this: "Put This On, a style series for men who want to dress like a grownup." So far, only the pilot episode is out (and you can watch it here), but Thorn is looking for cash so that he can keep this good thing going. Because working less than 80 hours per week is for commies.

- I didn't need to know this to like Johnny Cash, but I'm glad Salon had the good sense to take a break from stoking leftwing paranoia over Pantsuits with Wolves in order to share this kick-ass story:

"Johnny, would you be willing to play a few songs for us," Nixon asked Cash. "I like Merle Haggard's 'Okie From Muskogee' and Guy Drake's 'Welfare Cadillac.'" The architect of the GOP's Southern strategy was asking for two famous expressions of white working-class resentment.

"I don't know those songs," replied Cash, "but I got a few of my own I can play for you." Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of "Okie From Muskogee."

Go, Johnny. Go.

Also, this mini documentary about baseball card collectors is cool as shit:

Seize the day, y'all!

Photo from Pantsuits with Wolves by Darrow Montgomery.

Maura Johnston announced today that she's leaving Idolator, the pop music blog she's edited for over three years.

"Just wanted to let you know that today is my last day as editor of Idolator. The site will continue on, and I will continue to write about music, but we’ve decided to part ways," Johnston wrote on the site this afternoon.

Her departure will no doubt come as a shock to readers, who are by now used to seeing Johnston all over the web, from commenting on Perez Hilton in the Guardian to talking about American Idol on NPR; opportunities that–in this writer's opinion–directly correlate to the time she's put into editing one of the best music blogs on the web.

Johnston's goodbye post doesn't say why she's leaving. Washington City Paper attempted to extract an explanation via email, but Johnston would only say that she is "really excited to see what happens next... and to get some sleep."

Yesterday, 13 music journalists convened at Georgetown University for the Future of Music Coalition's Policy Summit panel, "Critical Condition: The Future of Music Journalism."

Our ranks included reps from online-only (Scott Plagenhoef of Pitchfork, Maura Johnston of Idolator), old media vets (Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune, Tom Moon of the Philadelphia Inquirer), and some in-betweeners.

While there were a few too many panelists for a coherent discussion, the ideological breakdowns were awkwardly clear: New media vs. old media, generalists vs. niche(ists?), and many, many iterations of "Kids these days don't know how to write about music," followed by, "We're all fucked."

After the jump, who said what and why.

Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired.com kicked things off by suggesting that music critics [Ed. note: the word "critic" meant different things to different people, especially to Tom Moon] have evolved from making buying recommendations to guiding/shaping/sharing taste (because now that everyone steals EVERYTHING, you can't exactly convince them to buy or not by something). He likened good music writers to DJs: They "curate" multimedia content, analysis, mp3s, interviews, etc.

Todd C. Roberts of The Daily Swarm supported this idea as well (Roberts' site is a HuffPo-like aggregator for music content), and Raymond Leon Roker, editor of Urb, spun Buskirk's sentiment into the instantly quotable, "Content is no longer king. The audience is king." Which, when broken down, explains why music critics who have not done so already must change the product they deliver; we're not going to stay afloat if we continue to write as if the release of new music is still a chronologically linear, critic-favoring process.

Roker's other big comment was that ad-funded content–scorned as it is by the likes of Kot, who said that anyone who thinks allowing an advertiser to subsidize a story or a Q&A should get another job–is a concession that his publication, which recently closed its print edition, is considering in order to stay alive. (Kot, righteous though he be, is a great columnist but not a publisher, and he won't have to worry about the bottom line unless it gets raised above his head.)

I went next, positing that any discussion of business models will likely involve cutting arts budgets even further, as there's no model in sight that will allow legacy media to maintain large, '90s-era staff in an age of cheaply run niche sites. A love for music is not qualification enough to expect a job, especially not when that entails writing q&as, show reviews, and meandering album reviews. No amount of biz modeling is going to save a publication that produces dreck no one wants to read.

Buskirk's post on the conference, however, suggests a way to keep traditional music writing alive in its present form:

Say you like to read Pitchfork’s new music coverage. Imagine a “Pitchfork Player” app for Windows, Mac, and cellphones that would present relevant reviews for each artist, album, and or track you’re listening to from your own library, or even from a streaming service such as Pandora. Such applications would have to analyze your entire music library or identify streaming songs on the fly — both of which are possible and have been done by other apps.

As rosy as this sounds, I stand by my point that there's no way to avoid reducing our ranks. "Relevant reviews" would likely mean the most widely read reviews, as the number of media players will never be equal to the number of music critics, and streaming services are more likely to form partnerships with content providers like Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, PopMatters, or even Wikipedia, rather than select reviews willy-nilly from an abundant number of publications.

Tom Moon and Greg Kot were the standouts on the first half of the panel (I left before the second half). Moon provided a passionate tear-down of, well, new media. He bemoaned the absence of "real criticism," for which he blamed niche writing and websites that support it, younger writers who lack curiosity about music, and the fact that no one provides "context" anymore. His diatribe, and Kot's, which emphasized good writing over frequent writing, boiled down to "There are no more Robert Christgaus" and "The internet fucking blows."

All in all, the panel was fun and depressing. Just like music writing!

The FTC has argued that this standard doesn't apply to traditional journalism outlets because "the newspaper receives the book and it allows the reviewer to review it, it's still the property of the newspaper."

It's an innocuous but offensive requirement, but I'm more interested in the FTC's imagined relationship between publishers and record labels and journalists and newspapers.

For one thing, the free CDs, books, and movies that come to the Washington City Paper come to individual journalists, not the paper, and if we like these cultural artifacts enough to review them, we often take them home with us and keep them, though we never ever say this in our reviews because no one gives a shit. In over a year here, I've never seen someone ask permission to take something home (though I have witnessed email fights over who gets to take what when supplies are limited).

Ergo, the boogeyman of unreported paid advertising is already happening. Music writers, for instance, do it for a living.  The New York Times doesn't let writers keep promos, but the Washington Post does. The great Robert Christgau even sold the stuff he doesn't like (according to my colleagues, this is still quite common and completely ethical).

And with regards to the future of music writing, where physical review copies are going the way of the podunk paper and its foreign bureau, things are about to get murkier. Will it still count as compensation if a label sends you a stream which you can access for a set amount of time for free, but which expires after two months? What if they send you files you can keep forever and ever–does the FTC have a system for tracking any of this? Does it have a system for measuring value? Is it going to raid WCP's offices now that I've admitted we get to keep all our promo shit?

The FTC's theory about how reviewing works sounds like imagined order at best, misguided favoritism at worst, and I hope to bring it up at the Future of Music Coalition's Policy Summit tomorrow, where I'll be a panelist on  "Critical Condition: The Future of Music Journalism," along with Maura Johnston of Idolator, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune and NPR, WaPo's David Malitz, Tom Moon at NPR, Scott Plagenhoef of Pitchfork, Casey Rae-Hunter of the Future of Music Coalition (and frequent WCP contributor), and a few other superstars.

If you haven't heard about the summit, you should go to this website now. I meant to post on this sooner, as the FMC's panels are absolutely amazing. You can watch a live stream of the proceedings at the same link.