After months of watching the finalists compete, after watching the votes come in, and watching the losers get eliminated, the competition has ended, the votes are in, and a winner – cue the confetti – has been announced. And the winner is… Azerbaijan. Yes, yes, I know, this week was the final week of the American Idol competition, but last weekend marked the finale (or rather Grand Final) of a much bigger, […]
If, like me, you happened to be working for Shopko in the late 1990s, you would have, by default, spent a lot of time with the satellite radio station they have piped into their stores. Lucky for me, the station was, in fact, a lot more interesting than we normally think piped-in retail music would be. It was while auditing the signage for the weekly ads on Sunday mornings that I was first […]
This is the sort of thing that probably wouldn’t happen here. I just don’t think Americans take their pop charts quite as personally or as democratically as they do in the U.K. Earlier this summer, a brand of kid’s shoes put out an ad featuring “Birdhouse in Your Soul”, the 1990 major label debut single by They Might Be Giants. The duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh have, since they started […]