I'm reading original, funny, short stuff at www.sawyerspeaks.wordpress.com

Thanks for all the suggestions from the comments aisle! Great to discover new rhythms. I find Feist's single "How My Heartr Behaves" on her "The Reminder" C.D. absolutely beautiful for those who have not given up on true love and also love male/female duets! Romanticism still rocks!

GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!!!!

How ironic that you presume to tell us the hottest songs of summer almost exactly 14 months after you shelved Audiophile.

I won't spend too much energy into complaining or ripping on anyone else's taste, but here are a few things I have had on repeat non-stop this summer:

The Mae Shi: Run to Your Grave (off of HLLLYH)

Abe Vigoda: The entire album of Skeletons (seriously, listen to it, it's great)

Meneguar: Anything off their new record, The In Hour

Vivian Girls: catch them live if you can, they play in Brooklyn non-stop

And of course:

The Hold Steady: Constructive Summer and Stay Positive (off of Stay Positive)

Grand Archives: Sleep Driving or Torn Blue Foam Couch

They won't get any radio play, but you should be able to find and hear all of these on the band's respective myspace pages. Look them up, it'll be worth your time.

All I know is that when I was a kid, we didn't have all this here new-fangled musical crap. We had ONE record (I think it was "I'm a Believer" by The Monkees--the greatest rock band of all time.)and we listened to it over and over again. Boy, that was good stuff! If we wanted to make our own music, we had a tin can and a stick and we sat in the dirt and beat on that there tin can till the cows come home and it was good enough for US. You kids today are spoiled rotten!

Sorry but that's just the truth. Taste is taste. Stop preaching at me like those losers on NPR Saturday from Chicago. We get it music ended around 1980 with the official end of punk.

Malkmus has definitely been one of my sounds of the summer. The girlfriend and I made the long drive down from Edmonton to Washington State to see him from the front row at the Sasquatch Festival. It's how we started off our summer and it's this music that has propelled us through it. For us, "Gardenia" is a song that will remind us of the summer of 2008 every time we sing it to each other.

I'm also enjoying The Hold Steady's "Constructive Summer," as obvious a selection as that is.

it's so much fun to watch blowhards strangle in assumption. Bless you, redkeds, for enlivening my Sunday.

I began this whole exchange with the idea of MENTAL AGE. It really doesn't matter how old your are in years as long as your taste--and, more importantly--your exposure to various styles of music is so obviously limited. It is interesting to me how much the "critics' picks" have in common. All of the performers mentioned are largely dependent on visual appeal, image and lyrics. In most cases, actual music and/or musicians are only a minor part of their overall presentation. If you are listening to a lot of "music" (ie: lyrics) by people much younger than you are, that is probably a symptom of arrested emotional growth. If you are NOT listening to an array of improvisational instrumental music and music from other cultures, that is just a case of self-induced ingnorance.

"Falling Without Knowing" belongs on an episode of "Veronica Mars"; it's the sound of a giggling teenage girl doing that awful "Footloose" dance barefoot on the beach while sucking on a cherry popsicle.

You... never actually saw an episode of Veronica Mars, did you?

Unless its also the sound of that girl getting brutally murdered. I don't know, I haven't heard the song. Maybe at the end of the song, there's rape and murder and you just left that part out.

Redshooz,

What makes you think you know how old I am?

I realize that rap isn't popular with Salon readers but where I live, summer is about cruising, and you couldn't go anywhere without hearing those beats coming out of someone's car. I'm old enough to remember Foghat too and while I agree that the "Lollypop" lyrics are pretty direct, "Slow Ride" was all about sex too ("...slow down, go down, got to get your lovin' one more time..."). Out with the old, in with the new.

As a 43 year old lover of music I have to disagree with your assertion that no modern music will stand the test of time. While I agree that 5 or 10 years from now most music released this year or any other year will be forgotten that doesn't make it any less important or vital. The reality is that some of the greatest music from any generation is often overlooked. I can only imagine how many people missed out on Big Star, Velvet Underground, Nick Drake, Fela etc etc when these artists were in their prime. That doesn't make them less of anything.

Personally I think it's important to embrace the past and the future equally. My Ipod has everything from Steely Dan, Cheap Trick, Fleetwood Mac, Lee Scratch Perry, The Carter Family and Queen to Black Mountain, Broken Social Scene, Boris, M83, No Age, The Hold Steady and HolyFuck. And it all mixes beautifully.

While it's true that a lot of music from any generation is crap there are nuggets in those droppings.

I hope you'll give some of it a try; I think there might be some stuff you’d like.

First of all forgive my typo in my response to Peter Joshua (their=they're). Secondly, I have hated Foghat and the like for longer than you have been alive. At a very tender age, I realized that most rock and pop were little more than disposable consumer commodities. At that point, I began looking beyond what the media and my peers told me to like and began to explore for myself. As a result, most of what I listen to today just gets deeper and deeper.