October 30, 2007

Tuesday Coos, “Music News Day”

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News

  • Dead Elvis knocks dead Kurt Cobain out of the top spot on Forbes‘ list of Top-Earning Dead Celebrities. Actually Kurt drops out of the Top 12 entirely. Other late musicians on the list include John Lennon (#2), George Harrison (#4), Tupac Shakur (#8), James Brown (#11), and Bob Marley (#12).

  • Rapper Nas defends his decision to call his upcoming album the N-word (which I typed once in the last story and now I just feel too queasy about it to do it again) in a convoluted statement connecting Barack Obama’s presidential run to the recent spate of noose-related hate crimes. “It’s probably going to make people uncomfortable,” he says about the album’s title. You think?

  • Arcade Fire’s Win Butler responds to Sasha Frere-Jones’ New Yorker article pointing out the band’s, er, “whiteness.” Butler begins with a serious discussion of Arcade Fire’s musical heritage, but once he correctly points out that American music is already so racially mixed-up it’s hard to tell what’s what any more, he seems to realize what the rest of us have as well: Sasha Frere-Jones is kind of crazy, and why are we spending any time worrying about this?

  • Blog Brooklyn Vegan collects pictures of this year’s hot Halloween costume (something you’ve already noticed if you went out at all over the weekend): Amy Winehouse. Fine, but jeez, ladies (and gentlemen): at least have someone else draw the tattoos on your arms so it doesn’t look like the scribblings of a 5-year-old.
    •

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    THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

    At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

    It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

    But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

    So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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