have you heard the new___?

...so, this week, Real Detroit has Vampire Weekend on the cover, a band whose debut album that no one's supposed to have heard yet just came out a week prior. They're a NY-based quartet of Columbia graduates who revel in borderline pastel-tinted docility, P. Simon-esque pastoral impressions, world music revival, maturely reflective lyrics and inventive melodies, something like an F. Scott Fitzgerald novella ensnared by the catchiest hooks of mood and voice you could ever imagine in your bubble gum dreams.

And thirteen minutes from now a blogger will declare and persuade other electric-box-worshiping-clickers to believe that this band is no longer cool and that they've got illegally pirated downloads recorded just twenty minutes ago from three other bands that are way cooler than the one we just put on the cover…

...doesn't make much sense and yet it's so common place in this internet generation.

I finally broke down the other day. It was a stinging dagger chill morning in the dead of January at the would-be neo-bohemian coffee joint in the commercial district, where I get my caffeine in take on leather couches, head between the headphones, writing music reviews for .5¢/word. This is during what is probably my 300th album review. There's only so much creative and vibrant adjectives one can effuse about shit that starts sounding the same, or about something you know deep down is so obscure that only 17 other people on the continent are going to listen to it, or writing about an album that you know everyone has already heard because they've downloaded it already.

What does one do in a world where art (in our case, music) is regarded as a litter of caged puppies all yapping at the same time, where the bloggers in their pet shop aprons come by and point out that one in the corner who can stand on his hind legs. The same pet shop boy blogger will euthanize that same peppy pup in a matter of months.

What does music even mean to Generation (wh)Y(?)

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I won't be updating this regularly...but you can read about bands here. Real people, real musicians, not just mp3's.