Honestly, I’ve heard worse songs and seen worse videos, but Mark Gormley underlines the importance of stage presense in a way that I have never encountered before. He is so awkward it makes me uncomfortable.

Mark Gormley doesn’t have any of the charm BJ Snowden exudes.

Speaking of charm, let’s talk about “A Cause Des Garcons” by Yelle. Yelle is my newest favorite French rapper — sorry, MC Solaar. This song is so infectious and I could watch the Tecktonik dancers all day.

Ben Ratliff sweats Prince’s indie cred in his review of Prince’s performance this weekend at the desert music festival Couchella. More importantly:

“Creep.” Prince covered it, letting the opening chords cycle for a while as he waited offstage. Screaming the chorus through the song’s slow-going apex, Prince got an indie arena-rock sound exactly right: a tolling, almost orchestral tension.

And luckily Glenjamn posted it on YouTube so we could all hear it for ourselves.

Glenjamn has a lot of concert footage on YouTube. If you’re into that kind of thing, check out his page.

The New York Times featured a great article, “The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start” by Natalie Angier (what a great name), yesterday about the evolutionary origins of art and the contention that to be human is to be an artist.

Here’s a snippet:

Art, [Ellen Dissanayake] and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.

Photo by OuroborosX

In “Pay What You Want for This Article“, the NYTimes examined this weekend whether Radiohead finally proved with In Rainbows that nobody does it better.

“Nobody Does It Better” by Radiohead

Photo by kamneed

Bill Wasik wrote a great essay, “Hype Machine,” on indie rock as a web extra for Oxford American’s 2007 music issue. Wasik dissects the culture of indie rock and the power of the blogosphere to turn an unknown band of yesterday into the It band of today, and ultimately, the passé band of last year. Wasik illustrates his point with The Annuals, a band touted in 2006:

As promised, half past ten on the morning of July 18 saw Ryan Schreiber, the founder and editor-in-chief of Pitchfork, place his imprimatur upon the new band, which he likened to “some fantasy hybrid of Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, and Broken Social Scene.

We’ve provided a few references to some of the songs and bands mentioned in the article for the uninitiated.

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