Matt Linderman writes:

Imagine you’re the drummer in a band. If you ask the bandleader for permission to do something different, it starts a whole conversation that may result in an argument or your idea being shot down.
 But what if you just do what you think is best? What if you switch to the ride cymbal during the chorus or use brushes instead of sticks? If it sounds good, it sounds good. Everyone can agree on that.

The one thing I think we can safely conclude from this is that Matt Linderman has never been in a band.

Link rodeo:

• Adam Gopnik remembers Saul Steinberg.
• The real progenitors of modern Republicanism are not Goldwater and Reagan but McCarthy and Nixon.
• Terry Gross interviews the great Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, of Philadelphia International Records [web, iTunes].

John Darnielle: "It's pretentious, but hard-won pretentiousness is its own kind of realness once you've learned the secret handshake."

Wait ... Jeff Tweedy is friends with Barack Obama?

Chuck Klosterman: "The GNR members Rose misses more are Izzy Stradlin (who effortlessly wrote or co-wrote many of the band's most memorable tunes) and Duff McKagan, the underappreciated bassist who made Appetite For Destruction so devastating. Because McKagan worked in numerous Seattle-based bands before joining Guns N' Roses, he became the de facto arranger for many of those pre-Appetite tracks, and his philosophy was always to take the path of least resistance. He pushed the songs in whatever direction felt most organic. But Rose is the complete opposite. He takes the path of most resistance."

Via Alex Ross, the musical majesty of Sarah Palin:

Link rodeo

• I'd always kind of wondered what "vetting" really entails. Clinton-era labor secretary Robert Reich explains.
• Disappointment of the day: Seth Schiesel is down on Spore's gameplay.
• Yglesias on "energy independence": "What you’re hearing here is a bit of political opportunism from progressives coming back to blow up in our faces."
• "Low self-esteem, creative, not hard working, not gentle": What your musical taste says about your personality. (It seems to me that if they didn't correct for demographics, this study is basically worthless.)
• Un-frackin'-believable experiment on the neurology of memory.
• This is kind of fun! Maybe I should start a tumblr!
  
• My last tumblr lasted exactly one week, but it may have been too narrow in focus to sustain my interest.
  

How is it possible that there is no heavy metal band named after this phenomenon?

Copy-editing the world: Is it kind of funny that Gavin Newsom and PG&E, trying to appear down with "Generation Obama," can't even get the name of the headlining band right? Update: It's fixed now. When I originally posted this, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! was referred to as "Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah!"

Department of OMG: Did you know that Stephen "Freakonomics" Dubner used to be in a band with Superchunk's Jon Wurster, one of my all-time top-five drummers? Did everybody except me know that?

Customer service: ARWWC'JG' emails to request yet more Billy Joel commentary. Perhaps she doesn't realize that the last word on Billy Joel has already been written, by the NYT's excellent Dan Barry, two weeks ago:

SOMEONE must sing a proper song of farewell for Shea Stadium, the nice try of a coliseum in Queens, as its dismantling draws near and a new ballpark rises just yards away. But that someone must be able to convey emotions specific to the place, emotions beyond the sadness of many lost Mets summers and the euphoria of two World Series championships. There is so much more.

The romantic idealism and the yeah-right realism. The quickness to mock and to take offense. The need to prove oneself better than any Upper East Side twit and the guilt from having conceived such a hollow ambition. The restlessness, angst and ache of the striver. The Long Island of it all.

Thing we just realized and got sad: Superchunk hasn't released an album of new material in seven years.

It's been a while. Couple of links:

• If you would like to listen to some nice songs, try Faded Paper Figures.
• If you want to read a good column on Hillary Clinton, Joe Klein can oblige.

That is all for now.

Cool LAT piece on Inara George's new record with Van Dyke Parks. Beyond the article's inherent interest, it also reveals how bad the LAT website's contextual referral software is. Inara says, with regard to her many side projects, "I think you just make sure you say yes to the things that you really want to do and no to the things that feel they're extra fat," so the website offers a link to "How to build six-pack abs: For that ripped, lean look, you need strength training -- and very little body fat in targeted areas." And producer Mike Andrews charmingly compares Inara's music to "beachfront real estate on an island that no one's ever visited," which prompts the suggestion, "America's best beaches: Dr. Beach ranks the country's top 10 beaches." Someone build a metaphor-recognition algorithm in there, quick!

Last year a friend sent me a link to Dylan Hears a Who, a mysterious and wonderful collection of songs that set the words of Dr. Seuss to music in the style of vintage Bob Dylan. Then some lawyers for the estate of Dr. Seuss got involved, and the site was taken down. Dan Brekke summed up the affair in Salon.

It's a shame that, unless you downloaded them at the time, you can't listen to these awesome recordings anymore. Of course, you could acquire them via Bittorrent, using this torrent file. But that would be wrong.

I feel kind of lame linking to a Pitchfork review. But I also feel kind of psyched: look, they gave Let It Be a perfect 10! O ambivalence! Update, now that I've heard it: The remastered version sounds great, and Let It Be is still all-time. Let's hope these reissues prompt Sire to remaster Tim, the Mats' major-label debut and perhaps the worst-sounding great album I own.

Indie-rock smackdown! First Stephen Malkmus, in Spin, says:

For all the mistakes that were made marketing Pavement, it comes down to the song; and the song ["Cut Your Hair"] was pretty good, but it just wasn't the song of the time. The Offspring song ["Come Out and Play"], "Cannonball" by the Breeders -- those were bigger songs people could get behind.

Kim Deal's response, in Time Out New York, seems to me a bit of an overreaction:

I liked Pavement. But if he keeps fucking smacking his mouth off about me, I’m going to end up not being able to listen to any of their fucking records again. Anyway, I thought, God, man, “Cut Your Hair” isn’t as good of a song as “Cannonball,” so fuck you. How’s that? Your song was just a’ight, dawg.

Fact-checking top music critics' assertions about digital audio file formats, second in a series: Sasha Frere-Jones writes:

I am using these posts to lead into a topic that I am going to beat senseless this year: the fidelity of digital files.... For instance, songs are burned onto traditional CDs in a format called AIFF.

This, I'm afraid, is totally false. Songs are burned onto traditional CDs in a format called Red Book. When those songs are extracted, losslessly, onto Mac computers (or a few others, such as Silicon Graphics workstations), they may take the form of AIFF files. Sasha: perhaps you should study up a little before starting in with the senseless-beating.

Slate's Taylor Clark on the disappearance of Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum.