Holding up the 48th second of the Beatles‘ “Rain” as an example, Wolk claims that, “if some band of 25-year-olds with radio aspirations wrote and recorded ‘Rain’ today…that take would probably be thrown out, or at least digitally edited to fix the screw-up.”

With respect to Wolk, this strikes me as a hollow, distinctly codger-y argument. (And one that cites exactly zero contemporary acts by way of illustration.) Couple points here:

1. “[The Beatles'] recording [of "Rain"] is a mess.” Not perforce true. Sure, it’s loose, and there’s a soupy-psychedelic lag to the arrangement, but the Beatles were always in tireless pursuit of shit like that. (As when John instructed George Martin to make “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” smell like “sawdust on the floor.”)

2. “It’s full of mistakes, accidents and inconsistencies that would be utterly unacceptable by the pop-music standards of 2009.” What “pop music” are we discussing here—the Jonas Bros., or indie rock’s more mainstream extrusions? ‘Cuz it seems to me we’re still in an era where authenticity, even salable authenticity, gets stored in the garage. manifested in tape hiss, &c. &c. The White Stripes were massive in spite and because of the over-discussed sloppiness of Meg White. And I’m no expert in the whole Jay Reatard thing, but doesn’t he tend to drop eighth notes here and there?

3. The Beatles is an odd band to tout as an example of studio imperfectionism. It’s true, their obsessions geared toward invention rather than toward metronomics, but after 1964, this was no garage band. These are the guys who lugged 40-piece orchestras into Abbey Road and spent over 30 hours recording this song.

4. Studio perfectionism isn’t a product of Pro Tools. And it’s not a phenomenon unique to rock, either—think Glenn Gould, whose OCD approach to studio work infuriated sound engineers and entailed unprecedented (and literal) cutting and pasting in order to effect a synthetic perfection that live performances couldn’t approach. (Christ, imagine what a pain he would’ve been in the Pro Tools era!)

5. “The lead singer’s wobbly notes, and the not-quite-in-tune bass guitar, would get fixed with AutoTune.” Sorry, how many current rock acts actually use AutoTune on a consistent basis?

What I’m wondering, I guess, is why we have to discuss this exclusively in terms of songs from the mid-’60s. “The high-tech ideal of popular music means no botched rhythms, no sour notes, no shaky dynamics, but also no ‘Sex Machine,’ no ‘Louie Louie,’ no ‘Rain.’” These are the only three songs Wolk even mentions in the post. I’d love for Fischer to chime in on the lo-fi implications of all this, and mebbe Riggs has something to say re: Emo or something like that. But this whole thing strikes me as a pretty straw-man mode of obituary.

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.”

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.

The Minnesota Star-Tribune profiled Ellroy in all his glory. NPR hosted him just yesterday.

Not one of those pieces, however, mentions Ellroy’s personal view on race, which is an integral element of his newest book.

I finished Blood’s a Rover on Sunday, and spent my spare hours on Monday searching for clips of Ellroy speaking about his work. (Honestly, he’s that fascinating.) After watching a sum total of 1.5 hours of video, I got the uneasy feeling that because right-wingery is an established part of his shtick, critics don’t feel the need to broach the subject in interviews or reviews.

Ellroy has professed a love of racist language (which he mentions briefly during the Q&A at the end of this lecture at Zocalo), and in the below video of a pre-election lunch with Rose McGowan and Bruce Wagner, the crime novelist says that Obama “looks like a lemur.”

That says to me, at least that Ellroy’s actual views on race deserve as much attention as his fictional depictions of race.

If you know of stories or videos wherein Ellroy talks about race, feel free to post them in the comments.

The results?

“In the end, Animal Collective edged out every other artist for both Best Album and Best Song. Artists like Grizzly Bear, The Decemberists and Neko Case weren’t far behind. One thing was clear: that 2009 has been one of the strongest years for new music in recent memory.”

MP3 tracks accompany the list for Best Songs of 2009 (so far), in case you’re not up to speed with what’s cool.

About that last point: Did ASC mean new music or new artists? The former is redundant; you can’t poll Best of 2009 (so far) using music released prior to 2009. And the latter is simply untrue. Bob Dylan, U2, Conor Oberst, Animal Collective, Neko Case, Grizzly Bear, The Decemberists–which of these is a new band? I took the remark to mean that the field is flatter, the world more fair, but I think that’s kind of naive: The Internet is just as good as FM radio and MTV at promoting some bands above all others and keeping them up there for a while.

Jonah Weiner has a piece up at Slate explaining the recent deaths of Vibe and Blender and layoffs at Spin and Rolling Stone. He serves his argument in three parts: 1.) “There are fewer superstars, and the same musicians show up on every magazine cover”; 2.) “Music mags have less to offer music lovers, and music lovers need them less than ever anyway”; 3.) “Music magazines were an early version of social networking. But now there’s this thing called “social networking”…”

Point no. 2 deals much more plainly on the topic of critic access (see: watermarks), with one strange deviation. Weiner writes:

“It’s a valid point that the professional critic still wields an aura of authority rare in the cacophonous world of online music, but between taste-making blogs and ever-smarter music-recommendation algorithms like Apple Genius and Pandora, the critic’s importance is being whittled down.”

Except, that’s not a valid point. It feels good, sounds good, etc., but labels don’t see “us” as authoritative and readers are often able to form their opinions, thanks to leaks and album streaming, before we’re able to tell them what’s what. (That NPR is using its readers to determine a best-of list is a great example of this. This used to be a privilege of music critics.)

Also, smaller point: The essence of a cacophony is that you can’t tell one voice from another. I really think that’s happening.

This comes right on the heels of an excellent feature story in the nationally distributed improvised music magazine Signal to Noise, which explored the same DC experimental music scene. (That article is actually mentioned in the NPR story linked to above.)

Paige Maguire over at NPR put together a 5-song playlist for anyone suffering from economic woes and job insecurity.

“For some, it’s years of cubicles and monkey suits and unbearable workloads, while others have lost their marbles and wound up getting walked to their car. Whatever happens, we’re guessing it’s going to be epic and terrible, which means you’re going to need consolation and encouragement in the form of five great rock tunes.”

Among her picks are The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” and The Dead Kennedys’ “Bedtime for Democracy.” She had some good tracks, but her playlist doesn’t satisfy my economy-induced misery.

Here are my picks:

Woody Guthrie – Better World A-Comin’

Deerhoof – Scream Team

Rush – Big Money

Walkmen – The Rat

Black Flag – Rise Above

What’s on your 5-song economic meltdown playlist?