elsewhere on the internet:

- yacht rock! i’d heard about this but have now finally tracked it down. from the same channel that brought us house of cosbys (and the story of channel 101 is an interesting one in itself, if you haven’t caught that particular meme yet) yacht rock is a series of shorts that peel back the ugly skin of that smooth brand of white-boy session muso pop from around 1979-1984 (think toto, doobie brothers, steely dan) to reveal the “true” stories underneath. check the hilarious first episode, wherein the true story behind the writing of “what a fool believes” is told. suffice to say it involves two badass motherfuckers called hall & oates. also check wikipedia for a definition of ‘yacht rock’.

- palms out sounds reveals the samples behind your fave basement jaxx songs. and 2 weeks ago they did daft punk! warning: hearing original samples for songs you like can sometimes ruin the “Mystery”

- when i went to uni i did a class on ‘pop music’. the main thing that i remember now was that my mate wrote a 10,000 word essay on the KLF, with pictures! but still it wasn’t nearly as cool as this - check out the week-by-week rundown of electronic music, as curated by wayne of wayne&wax… (this page serves as a pretty cool springboard to a whole bunch of interesting online articles and sites too..)

- an interview with kevin barnes aka of montreal, from remix mag. i like it when people whose music i am into do interviews in slightly nerdier, gear-related kind of magazines, because you get a bit of a peek into their process, & equipment (still haven’t listened to hissing fauna though)

- in aforementioned pop music uni class i read many articles by a certain simon reynolds whose blissblog is now a must-read: this past week he has been riffing on “hipster metal”… its news to me, but apparently hip pseudo-intellectual musicos have been flocking to metal in droves. but i don’t even understand grime yet, or dubstep! cycle back through the last weeks worth of simon’s posts and get yourself a wild, fractured education on the state of metal, or rather on the state of hipster/critic interaction with “metal”… seriously, this time next year, even you will be a metalhead, so get the jump on it now and get in first so you seem cooler than everyone else when the metal wave hits in earnest

- while we’re on the subject of terminally cool things, i like that klaxons song! and this video is cool! somehow i’ve avoided the new rave “is this anything” rhetoric/debate (by just not engaging with it or really understanding it) and just jumped straight into hearing a song and then liking it. thats hype the old-fashioned way! that track, and junior boys “in the morning”, and ratatat “wildcat” are my current unholy trinity of unstoppable pop songs on repeat. that klaxons song, to paraphrase something i read somewhere else, makes me want to be a promiscuous teenager in fluoro pants.. i’m guessing thats the appeal

- lcd soundsystem’s james murphy starts blog and then is assaulted by mobs of vicious comment-ers… sickburn