Fool’s Life is from Dr. Dog’s third album Easy Beat, released a year ago, and then rereleased right now. Why? The time is right for the strike, my friends. You see, there are a few truths about music that must be adhered to. The first is that mainstream music will mostly suck, even when it doesn’t. The second is that “Alternative” music will try to combat the mainstream, but, by most measures, will suck just as much. Alternative (currently being remodeled as “indie”) music survives on trends and fads just like mainstream music. I’m not sure where we’re at right now. We still coming down from the pop-punk to screamo-to “Green day wore eyeliner so now we do” goth-punk to the recent mish-mash lull before the next big wave hits. I don’t know what it will look like, but I’m pretty sure it will have something to do with boys jumping. Now, in between the mainstream and the alternative is where all the action is really at.

The Raconteurs are an indie wet dream. Jack White is in it. Brendan Benson is in it. Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler ( The Greenhornes ) are in it. How’s that for a perfect indie equation: someone you know (no indie-cred but safe and marketable!) someone you maybe know (some indie-cred!), and 2 people you don’t know (major indie-cred!). It’s like a license to print indie-money! The Raconteurs are so indie that they never even put out an EP, but it’s STILL better than their full length. That’s …

Psapp is pronounced like ’sap’. The extra ‘p’s are obviously some sort of sleight of hand to make you forget that you have to go to a fucking MySpace page to hear the band’s music (( To all bands who don’t let me download a track to sample, but instead give the option to go to a MySpace page to get a stream: Stop. Just stop. Sincerely, the world.)). Psapp is another in the long line of boy-girl couples that capture our hearts, like Jack and Meg …

VS.

One song. 2 videos. One directed by Michel Gondry, one directed and animated by Bill Plympton. Kanye West is insane. Discuss…
The story goes that Kanye commissioned Michel do do the video based on a previous existing friendship (Michel even plays drums of Late Registration). Gondry makes the video and Kanye decides that he hates it . Kanye scrambles, calls up Bill Plympton out of the blue and asks him if he could animate a video in a week because that’s when it was due to …

I remember being five years old and playing ET on my Uncle’s Atari. And, even at 5, I realized that game was like a kick to my only recently descended testicles. I was seriously like “What the fuck IS this shit? Fuck this, I’m going to go play with GI JOEs in the backyard and then drink some fucking Kool-Aid and shit because this game blows.”
If that random fact rocked your world, here’s some more:
- The lead singer of Wintergreen looks like a non-mongloid version of that hobbit bastard …

Let me take you back to 1998. Some company named Apple released a computer called the iMac, unknowingly causing me to have deal with the letter ‘i’ placed in front of random electronics, furniture, and snack foods for the rest of my life. You were gleefully listening to Chumbawumba, still years away from the inevitable shame, guilt, and condescending look of the register-jockey at your local record store when you tried to sell it. Also, for some reason, the world had not quite made the realization that techno did indeed …

As Bright Eyes (aka Connor Oberst) has hit indie critical mass it has become cool, of course, to think that he is not cool. And as much as I like to jump on a ’so cool it’s not cool’ bandwagon, the fact of the matter is that lil’ Connor here has never disappointed me. Even when the kid fucks up, I still want to listen to the end product 100x more than most people’s successes. For example, his recent ‘Digital Ash…’ album, which most describe as ‘inferior’ to the …

Michel Gondry is up to his directorial tomfoolery once again, this time with the help of Conan O’ Brien. The video is like a fucked up dream version of the White Stripes’ last appearance on Conan’s show where everything is stretched and weird and Conan ends his show by opening a hole in the set to find a dinner table with Jack and Meg waiting. And then Meg gives him a massage. This is just like my life, as I open trap doors to get massages from rocks stars all …