Posts Tagged ‘Letter From the Editor’

  
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Letter From the Editor: From 1992 to Granby, CT

by Jeff Giles

4161383004_ea14822707[1]In the fall of 1992, I was publishing a small Bay Area music newspaper– this was back in the BAM era, for those of you who were there, and a time when a person could say the word “newspaper” without sighing wistfully — and had been writing reviews for long enough to have become a jaded bastard, particularly when it came to demo tapes. In those days, indie bands didn’t have 40,000 music blogs waiting to be mass-mailed with download links, and they didn’t have affordable home recording technology; they had to schlep enough money together to buy recording time at an actual (albeit usually very low-budget) studio, and then they either had to pay to manufacture a few boxes of hissy cassettes or drive to Kinko’s, print up their own J-cards, and dub the things themselves.

This helped winnow out some of the really crappy bands, but certainly not all of them, and when I received a tape from a New York duo calling themselves the Rails in late ‘92, I wasn’t expecting much. In fact, if the letter that came with the cassette hadn’t mentioned that the Rails knew some friends of mine, I might not have listened to the album at all. Instead, not knowing what to expect, I popped the tape — titled Wonderfull — into my stereo, sat down at my desk, and listened. It’s been 17 years, but I still remember it vividly, because I didn’t get up from my chair until the album was finished — I just sat there, watched the late afternoon turn into early evening, and fell in love with the Rails one Wonderfull track at a time. The production was lo-fi and the drum machine tinny, but the songs radiated with all the yearning and anguish you’d expect from a pair of twentysomethings laboring into an eight-track recorder in an apartment over a sausage factory — and they were smart and tuneful besides. They still resonate with me now. I was hooked from the opening lines of the first song, “Far & Wide” (download):

Where you lead I will follow
And the clues you lead I will find
But I guess I’m always a step behind (more…)

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Friday, June 12th, 2009

Letter from the Editor: Parked in Alex Kimmell’s twodoggarage

by Jeff Giles

My dad was an opera singer when he was a kid and later turned into a huge folk music fan. He taught himself to play guitar and would sing all the time to my sister and me when we were little. My parents thought music was extremely important, so we had to pick an instrument by age 10 and take lessons for at least a year. My older sister was already taking guitar lessons, so I had to pick something completely different. I got dragged to a party with my parents when I was about nine. Like many of these parties, I was the only kid there. The host, Mel, could see I was bored out of my mind, and took pity on me. He came over and said, “Do you want to see something really cool?” I followed him up to the attic and as I turned the corner at the top of the stairs, I saw him pull a sheet off of this beautiful, old, glittery white Slingerland drumset. I couldn’t breathe and time seemed to hold still. Right then, I knew I was going to play the drums.

After a couple of years I started to take playing pretty seriously, and ended up majoring in music at USC. At my senior recital, Mel came up to me and reintroduced himself. We talked a little about drums; unfortunately, I never saw him again. A few months after I graduated, I got a phone call telling me that Mel had died and he had left me the Slinglerland kit in his will. So everything had come full circle, and I started playing on the kit that made me fall in love with the instrument in the first place.

Pinboy-by-Twodoggarage_dffq3CMcOs0x_full[1]That’s the beginning of the story of singer/songwriter Alex Kimmell, a.k.a. twodoggarage — and only the beginning. You’ve likely never heard of Alex, or listened to his music; in practical terms, he’s just another guy with a day job and a dream, one without the bucks or the luck to push his way through the crowd and into your stereo. Scratch beneath the surface, though, and you’ll find some uncommonly beautiful songs, delivered with a graceful hand and an open heart — the kind of songs you can tell have intensely personal meaning, expressed with the kind of universal sentiment that draws you back to them again and again. Songs like my personal favorite, “Everything Happens to Me” (download), from 2008’s Pinboy. This song has come up on my iPod dozens of times since I first heard it, but there’s something about it that strikes a deep chord in me. Every time I hear Kimmell’s clear, plaintive voice, the gently surging melody, and the way he sings the refrain… (more…)

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Friday, May 1st, 2009

Letter From the Editor: Does This Design Make Us Look Fat?

by Jeff Giles

84743728You may have noticed that it’s been a few weeks since my last letter — and that since then, we’ve rearranged the furniture around here, capping off months of preparation and hard work with the debut of the new and (if you ask us, anyway) improved Popdose. At least I hope you’ve noticed the redesign, ’cause it’s what I’m here to talk about today.

Not long after Popdose launched, we realized that the old design, while functional, exposed a fairly serious (albeit awesome) flaw, which was that we had too much content. Most weekdays, we were publishing a new post every two hours between 7:30 AM and 3:30 PM EST, which meant that nothing stayed on the front page longer than a day — and prevented us from effectively promoting “event” posts, like interviews and staff collaborations. The only way we could really get around this was by “pinning” posts to the top of the site, which had the unfortunate effect of making it look like we weren’t updating, or making everyone take a vacation, as we did when the Popdose 100 and Mellowmas ran last year.

Being that I read just about everything the site publishes, this design flaw has pissed me off for months, and patching it was my top priority when I set about redesigning the site. Taking inspiration from Salon — not, as a couple of snarky fucks have suggested, the AV Club — I spent a few months coming up with a new look that would allow for more content, more effective promotion of that content…and, well, open up more real estate for ads. Thanks to the coding wizardry of our pal Rahul, I’m happy to say that Popdose 2.0 accomplished all of those goals.

Of course, progress comes with a price, and our new digs have not escaped criticism, either from the writers who constantly pester me about putting the pill back into the site logo or from the aforementioned snarky fucks who have accused us of trading a “colorful” design for a pale imitation of the AV Club. I know we’re never going to be able to make everyone happy at once, but I am very interested in how our readers feel about their browsing experience here, so now that everyone has had some time to explore the new design, I’d like to open up the floor and get your thoughts on what you do or don’t like about the new look.

But before you give me your gripes about the way the site looks, I’d appreciate it if you could cast your votes in a poll. In the constantly changing stream of content Popdose produces, we’ve seen a lot of series go by the wayside during the last year. Some of them had to be put down — sorry, Cassingle Vault and Cutouts Gone Wild! diehards, they’re gone for good — but others have taken unplanned trips to column limbo, and I’m curious how you feel about that. Take a minute to check a box or six, and I’ll meet you in the comments!

Which features do you miss the most?

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Friday, March 27th, 2009

Letter from the Editor: Radio is Dying, but Music Has “One Life to Live”

by Jeff Giles

one_life_to_live_logo

I try to do right, I try to do right, because I only got, only got, only got, only got…all that I have is one life to live.

These are the words that greeted viewers of the long-running ABC daytime serial One Life to Live when they tuned in for a pair of episodes last May, thanks to a remixed-and-revamped version of the show’s theme song performed by Snoop Dogg. Yes, that Snoop Dogg. You may have seen blurbs here and there about Snoop’s OLTL appearance and chalked it up to a joke, or some of the hard-hitting investigative journalism the Internet is known for, but no — Snoop really did tape a two-episode guest stint that had him rolling into the fictional Pennsylvania town of Llanview to perform at a bachelorette party. As far as musicians-on-scripted-TV crossovers go, it was both utterly ridiculous and eminently believable — of all the multiplatinum veteran rap artists in the world, who would be more likely than Snoop Dogg to take the microphone for a small club filled with screaming women in a random Philadelphia suburb? — and far less awkward than, say, the Counting Crows showing up to play in a bar during an episode of Boston Public:

As any Ricky Nelson fan could tell you, musicians have been taking advantage of television shows’ built-in audiences pretty much since the dawn of the medium. But the slow, painful death of Top 40 radio — hell, of radio in general, at least as a reliable conduit for new music — has given rise to a new breed of TV music supervisors who actively work to connect their viewers with songs and artists. One such music supervisor is One Life to Live’s Paul Glass, who has used his position with the show to help turn it into a surprisingly popular destination for musicians promoting new releases. Many of us still tend to think of daytime television as the last refuge for cheesy strings and organ music, but when Mary J. Blige booked an appearance on One Life to Live in 2006 — and enjoyed a 40% bump in sales the following week — OLTL quickly became the Ed Sullivan Show of the soaps, with Glass booking and producing a succession of artists that now includes Lifehouse, Nelly Furtado, Simply Red, Erykah Badu, Timbaland (with the loathsome OneRepublic), and, uh, Puddle of Mudd (you can’t win ‘em all). (more…)

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Friday, March 20th, 2009

Letter from the Editor: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Kind of Like the Fray

by Jeff Giles

83764167Earlier this year, on my Twitter feed, I said something to the effect of “I can think of no argument against Demi Lovato’s music career.” It was a statement I thought twice about making publicly, and honestly, if I had been standing in a room full of music critics, I’m not sure I would have said it, at least not without an open bar. You see, even though a lot of the stereotypes about us writer types aren’t true — we don’t all look like Elvis Costello, and we aren’t all bitter, failed musicians — you’ll probably always be able to make at least one sadly broad generalization about rock critics: A lot of us worry far too much about how we’re perceived by our peers and readers. As has been pointed out countless times (usually by people who are pissed off that their favorite band gets shitty reviews), there’s an absurd level of groupthink among music critics, and there always has been — and the Internet has, if anything, made it worse, because now, instead of having to type out and mail a letter to Rolling Stone or a local newspaper, all it takes to grind your axe is typing out an anonymous comment.

Anyway, back to young Miss Lovato. I have the good fortune of being too old to worry much about my hipness quotient — and when I was younger, I was dumb enough to think writing four-star reviews of Toto and Bruce Willis records was the epitome of brave iconoclasm — but I’m still aware of the rock-crit parameters: There are acts that have cred, and those that don’t, and never the twain shall meet. I can’t pretend this hasn’t colored my outlook at least a little, and I think any writer who denies the same is either a liar or delusional; this is why, when we hear that one of the designated uncool bands has a new album coming out, we know it’s okay to mock it without hearing it. This isn’t what we’re supposed to do — it flies in the face of a discipline grounded in the idea that art can be appraised at least semi-objectively — but deep in the heart of most critics is a scrawny middle school kid who desperately wants to be cool, and stepping out of line is not what we do best.

I suppose the above paragraphs make it sound like I’m presenting myself as a brave exception to the rule, but I’m not. If I do step out of line, it’s because I’m not Chuck Klosterman or Rob Sheffield, and I don’t have much cred to damage; I’ve been fortunate enough to build a certain level of mild renown on the Web, but not enough to have to worry about scores of negative comments from people who think my work sucks — and perhaps more importantly, my livelihood doesn’t hinge on creating the impression that I have cutting-edge taste. If paying my bills meant acting like a big Menomena fan, then I have to be honest — that’s probably what I’d do, even though I’d suck at it and hate myself, and — here’s where I get to the point of this whole post — I would certainly never admit to not being able to come up with an argument against the Fray’s self-titled sophomore effort. (more…)

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Thursday, January 15th, 2009

Letter from the Editor: Happy Birthday Popdose!

by Jeff Giles

Howdy, folks! Like Jim Anchower, I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but now that Popdose is a whole year old, I figured now would be as good a time as any to rekindle our big old Internet friendship.

If you aren’t a longtime reader of this space, you may not even know who I am, so let’s start with an introduction: My name is Jeff Giles, and I’m the editor-in-chief of this establishment. Popdose rose from the ashes of my old site, Jefitoblog, after it was cruelly eaten by a ne’er-do-well hosting company by the name of Jatol (which is, I believe, Latin for “motherfucker”). I was all set to cash in my bloggin’ chips, but due to the gentle persistence of some friends and colleagues, I asked some of my favorite writers if they’d be interested in joining forces. Voila! Popdose was born.

Anyway, the thing is, Jefitoblog was basically an accident. When I started the site in 2004, I was five years removed from a career in music journalism that had seen me go from a young, wide-eyed music fiend to a jaded, not-as-young crank in the space of a decade. Jefitoblog wasn’t supposed to be a continuation of that career — it was just a lark, a way of talking about music with people who loved it as much as I did. I really only had my own domain because I couldn’t track stats through my LiveJournal account — and I’d only opened that because there was no other way of leaving comments on my old friend Ben’s journal.

And now look at us. Hell, Ben writes for Popdose now! (He’s the man behind our excellent Test of the Boomerang series, which would be one of my favorite weekly reads even if I wasn’t involved in publishing it.) (more…)

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