Christopher Drew (or as he prefers to go by Christofer Drew) is one of the coolest teenagers on earth right now. What makes him so cool is how instead of just thinking about doing awesome and lofty things (like most teenagers do) he actually does them, and then takes it one crucial step further and makes a pretty good livelihood from his adolescent antics. He is different and thus kind of cooler than other famous teenagers, like Justin Bieber, because he is an artist’s artist. Which is to say, the dude is a little cuckoo. And that his priorities aren’t necessarily all about making mad bank and getting his dick wet. Dude writes poetry and distributes it via MySpace for goodness sake. Dude is an artist, the real McCoy.

The latest installment in the oeuvre of Christopher Drew is quite an addition, a new record via his screamo-heavy-metal side project EATMEWHILEIMHOT! called xALBUMx. It dropped yesterday on Loveway Records (Drew’s own imprint within the legendary Sire Records). The record, like the whole EATMEWHILEIMHOT! venture, is an inside joke between Drew and the rest of his band mates who are all childhood friends of his. It’s a parody, a kind of Lonely Island of the metal, screamo genre; if you will: “joke metalcore.”

All eight tracks begin and end with the letter x. There is, for instance, the skull-shattering opening track “xDESTORYx.” A tune all about death: setting shit ablaze, shooting people with shotguns, and cutting up rotting human carcasses with chainsaws. Then there is the Deftones-esque second track, “xSMWHOREx,” which, according to the bands Myspace, is about “eating whoreish ex-girlfriends in sandwiches.” Or, my personal favorite, the third track, “xPIZZIAx”, — a killer belch of noise all about getting high with one’s bros and wanting to eat pepperoni pizza, but being able too due to one’s one’s vegetarianism and vegan tendencies:

PEPPERONI! EXTRA CHEESE! GIVE ME!!!
I MIGHT BE A VEGETARIAN
BUT LORD I NEED TO EAT!

Listen to
“xPIZZAx”

Buy on Amazon | iTunes

The rest of the album follows more or less the same pattern: vile, violent tunes with a very insular humor hidden within. There is nothing all that appealing about the record in and of itself. To a very select audience, it’s funny and even somewhat of an OK listen in that this is so bad it’s good kind of way, but that’s that. What makes the album worth talking about is, of course, that Christopher Drew is the voice, the organizer, the mover of this elaborate farce. Even if you don’t like his music, or him, it’s interesting to watch such a young artist experiment with different identities, showcase them, and then make it happen. And it’s made all the more interesting because unlike, Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus, we know Christopher Drew is the one calling most of the shots.

Today, L.A. pop trio Best Coast will drop their highly anticipated debut LP, Crazy for You, via Mexican Summer. Since April 2009, frontwoman Bethany Cosentino and bassist Bobb Bruno have taken their fuzzy hooks and neo-60s pop and sprung from scrappy, underground West Coast starlets to the epitome of blogosphere cool—and then, with advance copies of their unexpectedly brilliant record in tow, became Kid Cudi collaborators and Rolling Stone “Band of the Week,” garnering praise from NPR and the Times, moving from college radio’s DIY waves to Sirius-level indie rock status. Packed with ruthlessly catchy tales of unrequited beach-boy love, the band’s initial tracks floated from Bruno’s bedroom to an endless sea of taste-making blogs—now, the full-length is streaming exclusively at the Urban Outfitters website. Despite the band’s habit of releasing coveted vinyl 7-inches and EPs on small labels like Art Fag and Post Present Medium, their comfort with corporations extends further: a first music video pictured Cosentino frolicking around the beach with Ronald McDonald, plus recent song “All Summer” was tracked with Cudi and Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglijfor a Converse sneakers campaign.

With Cosentino’s honest accessibility and recognizably unique voice, Best Coast’s fan base is bound to stretch from lo-fi aficionados and music buffs to moms and suburban teens alike—and Crazy for You will go down as one of the current fuzz-pop generation’s quintessential records.

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Crazy for You is a collection of gleaming pop songs about awful, heartbreaking young boys, crafted distinctly for awkward, heartbroken young girls. Lyrically inspired by the simplicity and heartache of 60s girl-groups like the Shangri-Las and the Ronnettes, Cosentino’s songs are formulaic: she perpetually rhymes “crazy,” “lazy,” and “baby” when musing on a boy who is always leaving, repeatedly layered with “oohs” and “aahs,” reverb-laden Ramones-like guitars and upbeat, Beatles-inspired drums. Application of said formula to every track lines the band up with the 60s groups they set out to recreate, whose relentless devotion to minimalist boy-ballads is at work sonically and conceptually. As sun peaks through the reverby haze, Cosentino sings about weed-induced freak-outs and the potentiality of engaging her cat in conversation.

Listen to

“Boyfriend”

Buy on Amazon | iTunes

The record kicks off with the breezy drumbeat of “Boyfriend”— over a fuzzy riff and collage of Spector-inspired “oohs” and “aahs,” Cosentino repeats, “I wish he was my boyfriend” in a saccharine voice tottering between the 50s innocence and 90s snark that guide the record. Title track “Crazy for You” ups the tempo of the pop-by-numbers, crazy/lazy/baby formula, casually tossing in comical and now quintessential Best Coast rhymes like “Want to kill you, but then I’d miss you” and “Even though you are my guy, I always freak when I get high.”

“The End” and “Goodbye” are girly anthems written for an optimistic chick to manically scream into a hairbrush microphone while hopping around her bedroom. Inspired by The Everly Brothers, “The End” has a distinct Biz Markie “Just a Friend” appeal—as Bethany sings, “You say that we’re just friends / but I want this ‘til the end,” her lyrics are gripping and maddeningly relatable. Such is also the case on “Goodbye,” which sees Bethany unable to find happiness in “even TV or a bunch of weed.” The track delivers the album’s most incredible line: “I lost my job, I miss my mom, I wish my cat could talk.”

Crazy for You gets slow and ballady on shiny heartbreaker “Our Deal”—a previously released single and perhaps the album’s technical best work. Equally haunting is the chugging, three-minute “Honey”—though the album’s longest and most haunting song, it never quite reaches the spellbinding mystique of 60s groups like the Shangri-Las. Cosentino has joked in interviews about her inclinations towards Miley Cyrus and Paramore—it’s that polish that stands in the way of reaching a truly authentic 60s sound.

“I Want To” almost gets there: a gem buried in the sand, it’s a slow number with a cool riff and pounding, hypnotic bass drum, increasingly mesmerizing as Cosentino blankly repeats “I want you so much,” before breaking out a 50-second slab of rocketfire surf-rock. Album closer “Each and Everyday” bottles up her formula and eventually slows to the most vintage and 60s Cosentino is capable of, as she repeats, “You will never fall in love” over and over, a reminder of how romanticized an escapist world of beaches and sun and talking cats and weed really is.

Devoted fans may find Crazy for You painfully poppy and miss her more interesting and adventurous early singles: absent from Crazy for You, “Up All Night” was Cosentino’s longest and most heartbreaking work. The slow pop collage opens with a heavy wash of reverb recalling waves crashing on the sand; choppy acoustic guitar strums and layers of melodic reverb pile high to a richer and less syrupy piece. Another early, massively reverby track, “In My Room” featured slow and oft-indecipherable words. Early fans will miss the buzzes and wooshes; the ticking, mechanical wall of reverb that kept her melodies weird and safe. “When I’m With You” is a bonus track on the album and was released earlier as a single; undoubtedly a gem, the song’s slim, surfy guitar lines and straightforward main-lyric (“When I’m with you I have fun”) embody what she’s all about.

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The Best Coast Story is a simple, storybook Cali-girl saga, relentlessly rehashed and glorified by music blogs and magazines since last summer: girl grows up in California and becomes Hollywood child actress by age four, by age fifteen crafts demo tracks in line with early Rilo Kiley that send major labels knocking. She turns them down, and in 2008 moves to New York to study Creative Writing. She grows homesick and depressed by snow and comforts herself with beach music. Feeling uninspired, the 23-year old California girl drops out and heads homes with an Elements of Style to pop-song craftsmanship. In April 2009, Bethany Cosentino posted a reintroduction blog to her MySpace: “so i am back in california, and i thought what could be more fitting than to record a bunch of songs about summer and the sun and the ocean and being a lazy creep?” she wrote. “i hope that every11111 likes it and can make out to it on a beach blanket this summer.”

It helps that Cosentino has built a wall-of-buzz by surrounding herself with some of the most controversial figures in modern indie rock: her boyfriend is Nathan Williams, frontman of LA pop punk trio Wavves, who crushed the blogosphere last year after a drug-induced on-stage meltdown at Barcelona’s Primvera Festival. Drummer Allie Koehler, previously of the Vivian Girls, began a similarly controversial web presence when her band bashed non-punk people in a YouTube video that also went viral. Bassist Bobb Bruno seems the only normal dude on Cosentino’s radar—a musician and producer, he creates his own shoegaze/electronic, and has recorded tracks for a slew of impressive artists including Wilco’s Nels Cline. According to his MySpace, he’s opened for Wilco, Fiona Apple and PJ Harvey.

Thus, the Best Coast story updates another age-old 60s concept outside of their music: pop-star mythmaking. Via Twitter and her blog, Cosentino has crafted an unstoppably distinct web persona—bubbling with character, her online presence is why so many feel they can relate to her. She talks about everything from the Jersey Shore and Miley Cyrus to the Descendents and smoking tons of weed. On her blog, picture updates of Budweiser dresses and Garfield faces feel like a modern, bloggy version of 60s lowbrow Pop art; pictures of 50s boys with slick, jet-black hair and dark Ray Bans, plus videos of boy crazy Hayley Mills doing “Johnny Jingo” circa 1962, embody her aesthetic and sonic influences. She has a chubby, Garfield-looking Tabby cat named Snacks, with multiple Facebook fan pages and a personal Twitter account of his own. Bethany Cosentino puts herself out there; follow her online presence, and you will feel she is your best friend. And you’ll always love your best friend’s music more.

I’ve never quite understood how the term “art-damaged” became a rock-critical commonplace, but if I had to explain it, I might play my interlocutor Kevin Dunn’s “Nadine.” The 1979 seven-inch makes creased, crushed junk-sculpture out of a 1963 Chuck Berry song, with Dunn’s treated guitar and Tom Grey’s synths holding a blowtorch to the familiar boogie-barrelhouse interplay of Berry and his pianist Jimmie Johnson. On top, unsynchronized vocals split the song’s cherchez la femme narrative (one voice even calls out for “Maureen” instead of “Nadine” on occasion), coming together at strategic moments to emphasize Berry’s sharpest lines: “I was campaign shouting like a Southern diplomat.”

“Nadine” isn’t the earliest cut on No Great Lost(Casa Nueva), a new reissue of Dunn’s seventies and eighties solo output. It’s predated by “Cars and Explosions,” one side of an earlier single by The Fans, the Atlanta, Georgia outfit Dunn co-founded in the mid-seventies, with Roxy Music and Sparks as touchstones. History has not been kind to The Fans, now remembered mainly for the speed at which they were eclipsed by the crisply danceable strains of the B-52s, and the campy, college-town culture imported from nearby Athens. In Party Out of Bounds, Rodger Lyle Brown’s book on the Athens scene, The Fans consistently blow their best chances while behaving as though the world owed them a record deal. Others would tell this tale differently than Brown, no doubt, but one interviewee’s comment is telling: “Someone needed to tell them that the pop world does not work on a seniority basis.”

Dunn, to his credit, made his peace with the competition early, co-engineering the original, independently released version of “Rock Lobster,” as well an early single and album by Pylon, Athens’s other great dance-rock band. His own recordings imitated neither the fun-and-funk of those groups nor the self-styled “maximally avant garde” assault of The Fans, but staked out a cluttered corner of their own, combining exploded pop-song forms, dense, multilingual lyrics, and stiff New Wave rhythms. Some of the sonic choices are dated, as are Dunn’s vocals, which are clipped and unlovely in the Eno/Verlaine mode. But the variety of guitar textures, and Dunn’s concise, well-constructed solos, give notice that he’s working within a wider rock-historical frame than many passingly similar artists of the period.

Kevin Dunn 1981

Michael Lachowski

No Great Lost cherrypicks from Dunn’s later releases, but wisely includes the entirety of his major claim (along with “Nadine”) to left-field greatness, the 1981 LP The Judgment of Paris. Although credited to “Kevin Dunn and His Regiment of Women,” the album is, and sounds like, almost entirely one-man affair, relying heavily on drum programs and overdubs. The nine originals range over relatively straight powerpop (“911”), downbeat, spaciously arranged numbers too spiky to count as ballads (“Saturn,” “AG”), and piano-driven tracks that evoke David Bowie’s cabaret (or Cabaret) side – especially “Giovinezza,” with its toe-tapping hook, “Mommy, I don’t want to be a fascist.” A line from “Creep” nails the persona Dunn projects through most of these songs: “Another prolix prole who got in way too deep.” The “prole” part isn’t just there for assonance – several songs share a socio-economic thrust, with Dunn siding with the beleagured masses through a scrim of irony. The stately “Private Sector,” as surely a product of Reagan-era anomie as any hardcore screed, remains all too timely:

You’d better not do what you want to do
It’s bad for the state, but it’s worse for you;
It’s probably bad for the GNP
I know for a fact that it’s bad for me.

In an age of infinite duplication, when what we mean by photography or film or music is, with increasing commonality, a digital file easily reproducible as an exact copy of itself, there is something revolutionary about the very idea of a unique artwork. Limited edition vinyl pressings and packed-in hardcover art books are one thing, but really they are just a means of seeming to rarefy something which can be bought far more cheaply in an unadorned form (or acquired without charge if you are of threadbare moral fibre). Playing entirely improvised pieces of free jazz, the Australian trio The Necks are offering something quite unique: the chance to hear genuinely new music which will not be heard again.

When the lights go down in The Barbican’s theatre they go all the way down; the audience is in complete darkness and only the three musicians are spotlit on stage. Chris Abrahams sits at the piano, hands between his knees, staring intently at no sheet music. Lloyd Swanton cradles his double bass with his eyes closed. Tony Buck sits at the drums without a stick in his hand.

It’s Abrahams that starts the first set, tentatively keying something out on the piano’s upper register. After a couple of cycles Swanton’s bass picks it up and my eyes move to Buck who begins minimally supporting the structure of the rhythm which is taking shape. At first the relative slightness of the music builds a tension in the room; almost everyone here must be aware that The Necks’ modus operandi is repetition and escalation, but there’s something delicate about what’s happening which makes the enterprise seem dangerous. Because this is music being born, being created before us, the idea lingers that it might not survive.

Buck seems to be the primary inventive force in the first set’s development. His percussive coloring is nonpareil: with his right hand he succeeds in producing at least a half-dozen unique tones by striking in various ways different parts of one cymbal; he operates a small set of wind-chime bells with his left hand and gradually builds something on the bass drum. After a while I am aware that the sound now has too many elements for me to hold in my mind at once. It has grown and evolved, still rhythmically consistent with its very first moments but an order of magnitude more complex. Some of The Neck’s magic comes from this ability to lull you in the beginning into intense concentration on a small number of sparse musical elements, such that when the music intensifies you find yourself both invested in its skeleton and unable to simultaneously appreciate all of its parts. What results is a kind of semi-hypnotic state.

In the auditorium’s darkness and the performers’ situation in the spotlight there are parallels with Beckett’s Not I. In that play the rhythms of language are used to seduce and then overpower the ear and mind such that sat in the dark watching only an illuminated mouth on stage it is easy to become disorientated and mesmerised. Something similar is happening on stage as The Necks at once construct and are propelled by a wave of sound. The volume builds as the sound evolves, parts become more elaborate as if by mitosis. I shut my eyes at one point and experience this as something entirely different to any live music I have been audience to. There is an incantatory quality to what has arrived in the room: an organic musical structure, the vitality of which is no longer in doubt.

Speaking of the music in such a way has the effect of reducing the agency of the players. There should be no doubt of the level of musicianship on display, but The Necks’ genius is in removing themselves mentally from the process of the music’s creation. By being tremendously gifted at playing their instruments but not allowing ideas of ‘musicality’ to interfere with the directions the sound will take, they are able to create something truly unique.

The second set proves darker than the first, denser and less inviting though no less seductive. Chris Abrahams finds something he likes in prestissimo bursts in the high notes. Swanton at first compliments and then consumes what the piano had started, physically wrestling his double bass, at times grimacing with the strain of playing the note series he’s constructing. Abrahams’ piano relents and he retreats first to soft, closed-fist relays on the extreme low end and then a massage-like fingertip sweep over a whole swathe of keys. Buck relies heavily on cymbals, which he plays with unerring precision even when reaching to the floor for another stick or brush. In the set’s final minutes he places three upturned hand cymbals on the snare and adds to the work he’s doing with his left hand on the ride cymbal a completely different and absolutely complimentary right-handed rhythm. This is how the second piece closes, with the piano coming to a soft rest, Swanton having tamed his rampant bass into something calmer and Buck’s hand mothwinging between bright cymbal tones.

And once it’s done it’s done. Unrepeatable, this is music that has come into being and has passed out of being in our presence. Not without its rough edges, not to the delight of every ear,but enormously impressive, utterly absorbing and entirely singular.

If a track released earlier this month is any indication, it’s entirely unlikely that 32-year old Fiona Apple will ever give us another full-length album. “So Sleepy,” recorded as part of a project for Dave Eggers’ literacy nonprofit (826), was written by children in a songwriting workshop. “I’m a gummy bear/I stand up on the chair/Then I start to dance/to dance/to dance/dance,” Apple growls over an arrangement fit for a Swiffer Sweeper commercial.

The song is jarringly catchy, and is the latest in a series of sporadic, under-the-radar, uncharacteristically airy output we’ve seen from the musician since she released Extraordinary Machine in 2005. And as she’s made her slow but steady departure from the stuff of legendary angst, she’s grown less prolific. Her songwriting has long begun screeching to a halt; she now appears primarily on fundraising efforts and other people’s albums. She performed with Jon Brion at a Haiti benefit in January and has been working with Margaret Cho for Cho’s upcoming album.

A palpable shift occurred somewhere between When the Pawn… in 1999 and Extraordinary Machine in 2005, an album whose official release was threatened and postponed a number of times by creative squabbles between Apple, Sony and producer Jon Brion. Lyrically, the album lets feelings of boredom and contentedness seep through her trademark regret and vindictiveness. “If you don’t have a date/Celebrate/Go out and sit on the lawn and do nothing/’Cause it’s just what you must do/And nobody does it anymore,” she sings on “Waltz.”

And then there’s the video for Extraordinary Machine’s “Not About Love,” which makes up one half of her collaboration with prankster comedian Zach Galifianakis. (The other half is her appearance on, of all things, a comedic hip-hop track called “Come Over and Get It (Up in ‘Dem Guts)”). In the video, she wards off giggles as Galifianakis lip-synchs her words: “This is not about love/’Cause I am not in love/In fact/I can’t stop falling out/I miss that stupid game.”

When she appeared on The Late Show with Craig Ferguson in 2006, Apple looked softer, was remarkably animated and grinned sheepishly throughout the interview. “How are you going to write now that you’re happy?” Ferguson asked. “I only write when I’m angry or sad or something, because that’s when I just have to write,” Apple told him. I only will work if I absolutely have to. If I’m having a good time and I’m happy and things are going really well, why would I wanna stop what I’m doing to go and write at the piano?”

If Apple’s relationship with author Jonathan Ames bursts into flames, she’s young and talented enough to use it as fuel for a choleric comeback. But until that happens, she can remain contentedly subdued beside the shadow of her furious former self, and we can find new music to backlight our wit’s ends.

Everybody in the office was totally bananas about the premiere of “Alejandro” today. At exactly 12:08, we dropped everything we were doing right on the floor and ran to the closest Mac. With the delicious outrageousness of “Telephone,” which to me is still the hottest song on the radio, I didn’t really know what to expect from “Alejandro.” And actually, after watching the video I come away more confused than before I saw it, which is exactly how it’s supposed to be.

Here are three things to take away from the video.

Lady Gaga is in a dark mood.

Directed by Steven Klein, “Alejandro” is probably Gaga’s darkest, moodiest video yet. “Telephone” and “Paparazzi” were both like mini-movies, but “Alejandro” is more like a moving fashion editorial. Watch it and you’ll see an uncomfortably pale Gaga who is surrounded by just-as-pale back up dancers, and everybody has laser crisp bowl cuts on their heads. There’s virtually no color – mostly all black – and it’s set in a militaristic, World War II factory-esque netherworld.

The depressed mood, robotic dance moves and black clothes channel Janet Jackson and “Rhythm Nation” as well as Metropolis, the 1927 German sci-fi by Fritz Lang. That’s the thing about Gaga and her references: so many pop cultural references get scrambled into a single shot that she’s not “ripping off Madonna,” as so many other bloggers will say. She’s doing Ace of Base doing Madonna doing Janet Jackson doing Metropolis doing a gay porn film.

For a video directed by a major fashion photographer, who regularly shoots fabulous editorial campaigns for Italian Vogue, you might anticipate more In Your Face Fashion, the kind of stuff that makes headlines. And let’s face it, people love Gaga equally for what she wears as for the music. Gaga’s other hit “Telephone” was filled to the brim with highly editorial fashion, but “Alejandro” is a touch subtler than that. Don’t be fooled, though: on its black surface, there may not be outrageous couture – except for when Gaga emerges with those, um, snorkels (!) on her eyes, which, okay, is outrageous enough to remind you that she’s still “Gaga.” In case you forgot.

But “Alejandro” boasts an All-Star cast of designers: Emporio Armani, Alexander McQueen, Christian Louboutin, and Hussein Chalayan are just some of the heavy hitters who have pieces in the video.

So just, like, chill out, fashionistas among you.

Lady Gaga Likes to Flip Fuck.

You’re in luck, gay dudes! Lady Gaga is a top and a bottom. She puts her “man parts” to use and reams a gay dude doggy style, and he flips her over and does the same back. Now everybody can take turns getting everybody from behind. But the simulated sex is more like total adulation than real, actual sex. Gaga offers herself to the gay community, and the gay dudes give themselves back to Gaga. Celebrity worship is a lot like sex, I guess.

Though it’s not necessarily a new theme by any means, sexual liberation and gender-bending are totally two take away points from “Alejandro.” At several moments in the video, we’re confronted with a dude wearing fishnet stockings, high heels, or both. Close your eyes, homophobes! Can men wear heels? Can men wear fishnets?! The naked men-in-heels is clearly a rehashing of the infamous Purple magazine editorial by Karl Lagerfeld with hot model Baptiste Giabiconi, where Baptiste poses in a number of settings almost completely naked – in pumps.

And where there’s sexual liberation, gay sex isn’t that far behind. All those dudes rolling around in their high waisted, low cut shorts, chests fully out, high heels on, I’m just waiting on the gay orgy scene. The last time I saw this much gay in a music video was in Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” where the two dudes make out in the end. Aguilera went for a straight up gay kiss, but Gaga went for a much raunchier sado-masochism. You know, whatever works.

Lady Gaga’s Breasts Have Guns Inside…

By the end of the video, Gaga dances with her gays with a bra made of guns. Imagine how difficult it must have been to learn to dance with a gun bra! Boobs may be soft, squishy and succulent, but if you F with Gaga she will bust out her C cup AK 47 on you.

First came the gays, now the feminists. Gaga’s showing that she’s not going to let anybody, an ex boyfriend, a record label, a manager, anybody, mess with her. As much as the video puts sexual liberation on the table, the militaristic tone plus the boob gun makes me think Gaga is giving a serious message. Not too long ago Gaga Tweeted that her record label didn’t want her to release “Alejandro,” that she had to fight an uphill battle to even get the thing on the radio. We also know that her ex is suing her for a ridiculous amount of money. So take note, all: if you mess with Lady Gaga, she will release her army of gay dudes in high heels on you and fire at you with her boob gun.

You might think this is as old as Madonna, but I’ll never tire of what folks will think to put on their privates next.

It is startling to hear the voice of a person whose words you’ve read in books or whose face you’ve seen on billboards and in magazines. This used to be more the case, before the internet before the internet padded out our sensory experience of celebrities.

If nature doesn’t distribute talents evenly across the population, it would appear that culture tries to correct this by regulating the number of models (zero!) allowed to moonlight successfully as musicians. Yes, it’s difficult to concede that a person with a steep allotment of physical beauty might also, on top of it, wield separate talents. And also: models have a poor track record of transitioning from one field to the other, both in terms of merit and commercial success. Athlete-musicians are an analogous phenomenon. Actually, athlete-musicians probably have it worse.

Knowing this, it’s worth paying attention when Vogue designates column inches and the likes of writer Jonathan Van Meter (who has profiled Hillary Clinton and many others for the magazine) to Karen Elson, a supermodel who emerged in the late nineties with a bob and shaved eyebrows, married Jack White in 2005 and has released, this year, an album of songs called The Ghost Who Walks. Tellingly, it is not Elson’s modeling or lifestyle that Van Meter focuses on in the piece, but rather—really!—her music. Van Meter calls the album “a canny, beautifully produced mix of spooky alt-country, English folk music, and lullaby” that “somehow manages to evoke the Robert Plant-Alison Krauss vibe on Raising Sand, Courtney Love circa “Doll Parts,” and the sixties English folk-rock group Fairport Convention.” The piece is not only a sidebar to a fourteen-page spread of gauzy Annie Leibovitz photos, but one of very few times a model-turned-musician has received serious consideration in a magazine like Vogue. In light of this, we’d like to offer a consideration of the top five model-musician moments in recent history. Remember: it’s all relative.

Musically, OK Go and Erykah Baduh have little in common; the artists’ core audiences, even less. But their recent, much-discussed videos are cut from the same cloth. As anyone with an open browser knows, OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” records an elaborate, Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction, which unfolds in an unbroken sequence over the song’s four-minute length. What keeps you watching isn’t so much the mechanism’s can-do engineering as the knowledge that a single untripped wire or errant bowling ball would require starting from scratch. (In theory, anyway: YouTube user “freddiew” has pinpointed digital edits that suggest, like the band’s paint-splattered jumpsuits, the number of attempts involved.) Badu’s “Window Seat” also documents a notionally unrepeatable real-time stunt, as the singer strips to full nudity among unwitting passers-by on a stroll through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, in what appears to be an uncut six-minute take. (The location is a clue to the surprise ending, which I won’t spoil further.)

Neither video’s conceit is original: Badu’s is an acknowledged “cover” of Matt and Kim’s clothing-optional “Lesson Learned” clip, while OK Go’s emulates the Japanese children’s show Pythagoras Switch – though also see Trashcan Sinatras, below. Their appearance at the current moment, though, counterbalances the (not-really-a) hermaphrodite in the room: Lady Gaga’s “Telephone.” That featurette’s celebration of its own artifice (and the hype around its rollout) hearkens to MTV’s Reagan-area peak, with its world premieres, blockbusting effects budgets, and multi-clip imagery-arcs (though Beyoncé’s getaway pickup is no Eliminator). For all that Lady Gaga stakes out pop-celebrity’s cutting edge, these haute-‘80s qualities give “Telephone” a retrograde, even nostalgic feel. With the role of traditional broadcasting increasingly subsumed by YouTube, the high-concept, constraint-driven video may be better adapted to the way such content now passes from eye to eye: “You’ve got to see this” versus “This is what our programmers have decided you’ll see.”

The style is au courant, but not new. Just as “Telephone” nods to Thelma and Louise, Natural Born Killers, and Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle, the cinematic pedigree of the one- or few-take video includes Hitchock’s Rope, woven from ten sequences, each roughly a film-canister long, and the 96-minute unbroken Steadicam shot of Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark. Other inspirations lie at the margins of commercial movie-making, notably the “structuralist film” underground of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which explored the elements of cinema with an unyielding rigor, and the low-cost video documentation associated with Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and other performance artists of the period. The back-to-basics impetus of Lars Von Trier’s short-lived Dogme 95 manifesto-cum-movement also informs many of these works.

That last connection may help explain the mode’s present resurgence. At a moment when few listeners count the use of studio gadgetry — from ProTools micro-editing to pitch correction — against artists’ credibility, these videos transfer old arguments about “integrity,” in the root sense of “wholeness,” from the auditory to the visual plane, with Badu’s forthright presentation of her own body as the clearest case. With the notion of a “sell-out” sounding ever more archaic, much the same applies to the kind of integrity involved in artists’ increasingly internecine business dealings. “This Too Shall Pass,” for example, marks OK Go’s ability to call their own shots since buying themselves back from Capitol/EMI, but the video’s production was underwritten by State Farm Insurance. Make no mistake: Formal devices notwithstanding, the videos below are no more (or less) real or authentic than any others, serving the same promotional functions and projecting their artists’ images – even those that never appear onscreen — no less self-consciously than Gaga’s saturated palette and frame-dropping jitters. Even so, they form a minor counter-tradition to the rapidly-edited, slickly art-directed norms of the genre. While music video remains, in Greil Marcus’ memorable phrase, “the pornography of semiotics,” many of these examples are, if nothing else, closer in spirit to Andy Warhol’s Blowjob than the Dark Brothers’ New Wave Hookers.

Though it hints at narrative elements purged by later, purer practitioners, one of the seminal works of structuralist cinema is Michael Snow’s 1967 Wavelength, comprised of a single 45-minute zoom-shot that moves at a mechanical rate toward one wall of a nearly-abandoned loft space. The Replacements’ variant inverts Snow’s central move: the clip’s sole shot is a slow pull-back from a stereo speaker into a milkcrate- and ashtray-littered living room, its most prominent “action” the speaker cone’s pulsations. It’s likely that they hit on the strategy independently, as a way of raising a middle-finger to “corporate” manipulation of their images – and consolidating their own.

An elegantly-staged but otherwise standard multi-camera soundstage performance, with one crucial difference: Michael Stipe’s vocal is the one you see him singing, recorded during the shoot against the instrumental track mimed by the rest of the band. (For unknown reasons, currently available online versions substitute the original studio track.) This was a canny choice for a band heavily invested in their audience’s recognition of their relative autonomy, and whether R.E.M. made it out of annoyance with one of the form’s foundational fictions or to indulge Stipe’s uncertainty about his own lipsynching skills, one thing is clear from their later career: they got over it.

Michelle Madonna (real name) was born in Long Island, NY and after a short stint in Los Angeles settled in Manhattan on the Upper East Side. She describes herself as “vampire, camera whore, and wannabe socialite with terrible insomnia.” She is currently finishing a degree in Visual merchandising at the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising. She also makes pop music.

What are you doing with your life?
To be completely honest, I’m actually not sure. There are definitely a lot of things I want to do, but it takes time. I’m not rushing towards anything; I’m going slowly and just enjoying every second of it. I’m definitely going to continue working on my music. That is something which I really enjoy to do and it makes me happy.

Will you share one of your songs with us?

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What’s so great about reality TV?
How far away from reality it is.

What are your favorite brands and clothing pieces?
My favorite place to shop is Intermix. I loveee Marc Jacobs! His clothes are so unique and the jeans are awesome!

Are you dating anyone?
Nope. I’m not a big fan of boyfriends. I like doing my own thing and I don’t like having someone tell me what to do. I already have parents.

Nik Richie: Would you?
Stamp, next.

What’s the best restaurant in NYC?
Koi in Bryant Park.

What are you reading?
I just read the book Crazy Love by Leslie Morgan Steiner. Pretty intense story but it was really good.

What can’t you do without?
My blackberry. I seriously would sell a kidney to get it back if I lost it. It went flying out of my hand into the crowd at Coachella during David Guetta’s set. I literally got down on my hands and knees and crawled around people’s feet looking for it. And I actually found it!

Speaking of organs, how is your liver?
My poor liver. Manhattan is seriously the best place to party. I’ve experienced nightlife in a lot of cities and they all suck. My favorite nights to go out are Wednesdays and Sundays. I hate NYC nightlife on the weekends. Everything is so packed and everyone is from like Staten Island. Over the weekends my favorite thing to do is go to brunch parties during the day. I just party all day.

How do you have time for school and your music and partying?
Haha. I told you I am vampire.

Is what they say true? You’re a horrible bitch?
The worst! Watch out.

It’s entirely fitting that LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy supplied the score to Noah Baumbach’s Zoloft-laced rom-com Greenberg earlier this year. The film’s namesake and protagonist is a sour, fortyish ex-musician using his last few shards of hipster cred and cynicism as shields against a past dotted with blown record deals and poorly-tended relationships. Murphy, also 40, knows – almost was – this foot-shooter: This, after all, is a man who managed to ignore an offer to join the writing staff of Seinfeld in his early 20s. Much of “Losing My Edge,” the 2002 track that brought the art-rocker (Speedking) turned soundman (Six Finger Sattelite) turned West Village party DJ to unexpected prominence, could be drawn from Roger Greenberg’s self-talk: “I’m losing my edge to the kids…But have you seen my records?”

The figure Murphy portrays in his songs, and in some interviews, is exactly the guy who doesn’t manage to transcend his scene, but the story has turned out differently in real life. Against long odds, both LCD Soundystem and (with Tim Goldsworthy) the associated label/production entry DFA (Death From Above) have gone from success to success, with 2006’s Sound of Silver featuring on many critics’ end-of-the-year and even end-of-the-decade lists while generating actual chart action in the U.K. (The U.S. mainstream, for better or worse, still prefers its electronic pop fronted by divas rather than meaty, stubbly Irish-Americans.)

Murphy can sometimes seem a theoretician of cool who just happens to issue his latest findings on vinyl and plastic, and given that the LCD/DFA brand is his own best experimental subject, it’s inevitable that the just-released This Is Happening makes reference to the act’s fortunes and modest celebrity. “I’ve been filmed being ridiculous – oh, eat it Michael Musto!” runs an insiderish aside in “Pow Pow,” the album’s closest approximation to the beats-plus-soliloquy format of “Losing My Edge.” The bulk of the track, an eventful eight minutes of prefab timbale loops and Laser Tag effects against an implacable 808 pattern – thanks, liner notes! – is a fairly abstract paean to ambivalence in all its guises, capped by a call-and-response on the unlikely phrase “There’s advantages to both!”

“You Wanted A Hit” covers adjacent territory, ringing changes on the hoary “we don’t hear a single” conflict between artiste and “suit”: “You wanted it lush, but honestly you must hush…You wanted a hit? Well that’s not what we do.” Such posturing is probably not to be taken at face value, especially as DFA’s relationship with Virgin/EMI is said to be a relatively happy one. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether the song’s primary addressee is the label, the fans, or even other artists. (A fruitless stab at collaborating with Britney Spears a few years back might be in the mix.) Appropriately enough, the music combines Murphy’s most and least commercial tendencies, opening with a three-minute crossfade between a near-parody of a half-finished ambient house cut and a sleek 4/4 groove that could have appeared on any Cars album. (The last-mentioned bit feels radio-ready to me, but then, I’m 40 too.)

For the most part, though, This Is Happening deals with raised expectations by ignoring them. There’s no radical rethink of Murphy’s formulae here – and he does have more than one – just a more finely-tuned apportioning of their two key elements: alt-rock “expressiveness” and club-music “facelessness.” Despite the expected complement of nauseous synth settings and filter-and-fader trickery, the album as a whole favors the former: For sheer dancefloor functionality, only “Pow Pow” is likely to match LCD’s last between-album 12”, a cover of Suicide’s “Bye Bye Bayou.” “Drunk Girls” catches Murphy in his most referential and reverential rockist mode, with both the two-note shouted hook and the chord change on which its variant lands (“Drunk boys!”) hailing from The Velvets’ tweaker anthem “White Light/White Heat.” This is very meta. What could be cooler than a thinly-disguised bite of something that you and your audience both know (or should), that has been apotheosized as cool for so long that it isn’t cool anymore, except when it is? The song’s choice as lead single may have less to do with the music than with its down-with-the-kids verbal atmosphere, with the lines between the hooks flying by like so many Tumblr posts: “Drunk boys, keeping pace with the pedophiles…Drunk girls wait an hour to pee.” Murphy’s getting a little old for this scene, and it’s getting a little old for him, but empathy trumps envy when the bridge turns suddenly sweet: “I believe in waking up together…I believe in making eyes across the room.”

Buy This Is Happening on Amazon.com

The synthesis Murphy aims for here and elsewhere is guided by the concerns he described to a Pitchfork scribe back in 2007: “Gestures of rock in the vocals, the rock gesture in the production, the manipulation of sound, sound being the manipulator in terms of cool versus sound being a manipulator in terms of the body.” He doesn’t hit the target every time. Another rock-oriented track, “All I Want,” has promising ingredients – a thick, Malkmus-via-Ronson guitar lead, an aleatory keyboard solo – but suspends them in a wash of echo at odds with the appealingly transparent mixes on most of the album, while “Somebody’s Calling Me,” modeled on the recently rediscovered “minimal wave” subgenre of European new wave, belongs, like the debut album’s Fall-ventriloquizing “Movement,” to his thankfully small category of one-influence experiments.

Despite the LCD’s heft as a singles act and DFA’s traffic with remix culture, Murphy remains, generationally and even temperamentally, a believer in the album form – not as pop music’s “highest” form, but as one of several, each with their own potentials and constraints – and, in context, even the half-baked tracks here serve the honorable function of cleansing the palate for the more satisfying courses. I’m not about to predict whether This Is Happening will match the already-iconic Sound of Silver for staying power – the end of this decade is too far away for that – but one suspects that Murphy himself doubts it. He’s already intimated that this album will be the last under the LCD Soundsystem moniker (the Greenberg soundtrack, done under his own name, is a step in that direction), and has periodically suggested to journalists that he’s bracing himself for a backlash. Whether that thought is just toxic residue from the obscurationist microculture that shaped Murphy’s sensibility, or another self-canceling joke at the expense of that very attitude, I have news: If he’s looking for backlash, he’ll have to make far worse records than this one.