Yeah that "bad pre-grunge, indie-band videos" line rankled with me, too - waaay too dismissive of what was essentially a landmark show for Gen X's musical taste. Granted, Lauerman isn't a music journalist, so it's no surprise that he got some key deets wrong here, but hell, NYC is LOUSY with underemployed music journos who could do a much better job at this from Lauerman and not offhandedly dis an entire demographic. One more reason that Slate routinely beats Salon is that Slate has Jody Rosen as a staff music critic. Salon has nobody and it's music coverage is spotty and often embarassing.

Let it all fall down. Marx predicted the ultimate crisis in late stage capitalism over a hundred years ago. Looks like he was right. Time for socialism for real.

Why does Salon consistently churn out some of the worst music criticism/journalism on the web? Maybe instead of giving these kind of stories to staff writers who clearly don't know what the fuck they're talking about (although I did enjoy the reference to 24-7 Spyz... I haven't thought about those guys in years!), Salon ought to freelance them out to an actual professional music journalist or two? God knows there are plenty of them here in New York and any one of them could write smarter copy than this. Ugh.

Forget the 12th century French troubadours... rock and roll was invented in the 9th century by an Arab-speaking Persian ex-slave who fled the Abbasid court in Baghdad for the Ummayyad court in Cordoba. Songs of romance and lust, drunkeness and abaondon, wild new hairstyles, fashions and dance crazes, girls going crazy for him and techincal musical innovations that were copied by legions of imitators (including the troubadors a few centuries later). Ziryab was the first rockstar:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziryab

Oh, I just assumed that's because we were talking about bands that DIDN'T suck.

I was more troubled by the lack of Fishbone, The Dirtbombs and Phil Lynott than by those crap merchants.

Anyone who believes that Jesus was born to a version and magically "vanquished death" by rising from the dead before ascending bodily into heaven believes in utter nonsense. And those who believe in transubstantiation - that their parish priest can chant a magic Latin incantation and turn simple bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ - get bonus points for nuttiness AND cannibalism.

Religion makes people irrational. That's why the Dark Ages were a direct consequence of the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.

Welcome to the new Dark Ages. Sarah Palin and her crackpot "anti-elitism" is the face of our decline.

Dude - you are the perfect example of the kind of paranoid, irrational loon that's dragging us all into a morass of ignorance and stupidity. Why don't you shut the fuck up with all your misguiding whining about "liberals" and "the elite" and actually do something useful with your life you dumb fuck? Nobody wants to hear you stupid neocon crackpots ranting your discredited nonsense anymore. You erroneously attack "liberals" for thinking we "know everything" when the entire basis of our belief system is rational skepticism: that is doubt, tempered by reason. You, on the other hand, are a fatuous idiot and a loudmouth who bases his whole worldview on disinformation, stereotypes, paranoia, disinformation and emotion rather than facts. Guess what, asshole - the rest of us are sick of that crap and decent, educated people are not going to deal with your brand of bullshit anymore. Your proudly willful ignorance is an artifact of the Bush era. You are officially irrelevant. Get used to it.

Were there any middle class Protestants in Dachau in 1931? Dachau is in Bavaria, a suburb of Munich. Bavaria is one of the most uniformly Catholic parts of Germany and has been ever since the great German religious "sort" of the Thirty Years War. Not sure why you included a religious signifier in your analogy, but it's kind of important to get things right when it comes to the good herrenvolk of Dachau...

The missus and I are much more interested in machines that can watch our kids for a few hours while we go to a movie or see our friends. Fucking is overrated anyway. Fucking is what got us into this mess in the first place... thank God I got the ol' snip-snip!

... to assist any Republican anywhere with hara-kiri. And I think most decent Americans feel the same way these days.

Nice try, dumbfuck, but I DO know you from your posts and you do NOT "attack the right and the left equally". You claim to be a "centrist liberatarian" (whatever the fuck you think THAT means) but all you ever really do is attack the left and embrace the failed crackpot ideologies of the far right. Just look at your lame attempt to respond to me - all you did was bash the left with a bunch of unsubstantiated nonsense based on your own ignorant prejudices. You're full of shit and I am calling you out on it. You can try to talk down to me but I will laugh in your ignorant fucking face, you absurd dumbass. Also if you're too fucking stupid to realize that doubt and skepticism are the root of open-mindedness and reason, then you're even farther gone than I thought you were. You are pathetic and decent, hardworking, educated, responsible people like me are not going to let you spew your insane filth without calling you out on it ever again. Get used to it, fool. Your reign of disinformation and bullshit is OVER.

Ever notice how whenever Camille starts valorizing some new "feminist icon" she's basically just crushing real hard on that person? Camille needs to stop wrapping up her libidinous nonsense in academic doubletalk and just admit that she wants to fuck Palin.