All Headline News: “Sources say that George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley are going to reform Wham!.”

I’m concerned here. And it’s not just because of the period that follows the exclamation mark in that sentence, but because I’ve long referred to Ridgeley as “That Other Guy.” I’ve felt very comfortable doing this over the years and, if Wham! is to reform, then referring to him as Ridgeley is going to require a synapse I don’t feel like using, something that I’d rather use to memorize a line of poetry than another pedantic pop cultural nugget.

Van Halen & David Lee Roth, with Eddie Van Halen’s son Wolfgang filling in for Michael Anthony. (via Fimoculous)

It seems that this year’s Coachella lineup has been leaked, with Rage Against the Machine headlining Sunday.

Rage Against the Machine. Who disbanded seven years ago.

If this means that the whiny Chris Cornell is permanently out of a job and Zack de la Rocha has finally come to his senses, then, as we say here in California, hell yeah!

[UPDATE: It’s up at the Coachella site. Rage closing on Sunday.]

There’s a simple reason why classical music culture is dying. The culture behind it isn’t endemic to youth. Consider the ticket prices and the required formal attire. Right now, if I wanted to see the San Francisco Symphony perform Mozart’s C Minor Mass, I’d have to spend anywhere between $62 to $220 for my girlfriend and me to see it. Factor in dinner and parking and the tab (at midrange) comes out to about $200 for an entire evening (unless, of course, I can somehow score a laughable student discount, where I save a mere 50%, but only if I attend six shows). Plus, I’d have to dress up to look presentable (not that I mind doing this, but I really don’t like wearing neckties).

Conversely, I can go to Bottom of the Hill in a scruffy T-shirt and jeans and pay a whopping $24 to see three bands play. Plus, I can drink beer.

It’s really as simple as that. $200 is a lot of money to fork over. I can’t imagine how much a classical music junkie might pay. (Is it in the four digits?) Small wonder why upper middle-class people over the age of 50 are patronizing these shows. They have a little thing called expendable income. (Full confession: I’ve worked as an usher to see high-ticket theatre and symphonies because I didn’t have the dinero to spring for it. What does that say about putting the “class” into classical music?)

If symphonies want to survive, then they need to eject the decorum associated with attending classical music concerts and decrease their ticket prices. If my peregrinations to the free (and crowded) Stern Grove summer concerts are any indication, people are still interested in listening to live classical music. In fact, you’re likely to find younger people there because they can come in early, have themselves a little picnic (without dressing up), and not fork over an astronomical sum of money to hear a symphony play. They get to experience a concert in a comfortable and affordable setting. It’s one of the best deals in San Francisco.

So why don’t symphonies offer a few dress-down concerts at reduced prices? Or is this too lowbrow for them to handle?

[RELATED: In addition to Greg Sandow’s blog (where all this originated from), you can check out this article, which applies Beckerian theory to symphony concert demand in an attempt to isolate the problem (although it concludes that income has no direct bearing upon supply and demand, it doesn’t penetrate into the cultural trappings I suggest above). There’s also this 1923 Time article, which reports that then New York Philharmonic chairman Clarence Mackay concluded that symphonies could not profit even with full attendance at all concerts. And this 2005 study from Leo J. Shapiro and Associates draws a few different conclusions than Sandow: 40% of the adult audience is under the age of 45, but it does acknowledge the median age at 49. Further, median income of concertgoers is (no surprise) $65,000, with the opera-going median at $113,000. And 51% of classical music goers also attend pop concerts. But there is this striking conclusion: “A deterrent to the continuity of the audience for classical music performance is the price of tickets.Ticket prices have generally outpaced inflation making the bite of attending classical music performances a bigger share of the family budget.”]

Washington Jewish Week: “But the Oklahoma-born son of a cowboy with political aspirations, all-American, inveterate wanderer and folk poet also created a collection of songs that speak directly to the Jewish soul, some of which even feature mamaloshen — Yiddish.” (via The Happy Booker)

• The Breaks: searchable database of samples used in pop music.
• The Amen break: the most frequently used sampled drum loop in hip hop (with sample).
• 20 minute historical video of the Amen break.
• Most prolific film composers.
• The Functions of Film Music.
• The role of video game music.
• Classical Theme Music in Radio, TV and Film.
• Classical Music in Cartoons, Movies, Commercials: a list of tracks where children are most likely to have first heard them.
• A comprehensive organ roll list.
• Identifying a record by its grooves.

The Top 50 Music Videos of 2006. Some obvious picks (OK Go, Gnarls Barkley), but any list that includes Xiu Xiu can’t be all bad.

“You Know My Name”

…I like your potty mouth and all, but I liked “Boys Wanna Be Her” the first time when it was called “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.” (I think I like Peaches more than I should because she used to be a librarian.)

…and it’s called The Good, The Bad and the Queen. Of course, with the way he starts new bands, he’ll have another one next month.

BBC: “A judge has dismissed claims by the ex-frontman of rap group 2 Live Crew that rapper 50 Cent stole the opening line for the 2003 single In Da Club. Luther Campbell filed a claim at Miami Federal Court in January that 50 Cent used a line from Campbell’s song It’s Your Birthday, changing just one word.”

Luther Campbell, as you will recall, was sued for similar purposes in 1992 and won.

BBC: “”The guitarist walked out, leaving his band-mate to complete the interview. Stern later said he was ‘very sorry.’ Townshend left a reply on his website, saying: ‘Howard, let’s have lunch.'”

LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy has apparently created a track called “45:33” for Nike. The song, designed for a workout, is available through iTunes for $9.99. In other words, Bittorrent is your friend.

Slate: “Unlike Salvador Dalí or Mel Gibson, Yankovic isn’t essentially weird—i.e., a figure with whom we have nothing in common. In fact, the opposite is true. Weird Al’s essential service is to point out that, from the perspective of the middle-class suburban lifeworld, pop culture itself is weird. This is the paradox of Weird Al’s weirdness: He’s actually Normal Al, a common-sensical, conservative force. He’s Everyman trapped on Neverland Ranch, exposing as many stylistic excesses and false profundities as he can.”

I haven’t yet listened to the new album, Boys and Girls in America. I plan to rectify this solecism soon. What I can tell you is that I saw them Tuesday night and I can tell you, with very little doubts, that these guys kick ass live. Like Tito, who was there with me, I’m still percolating upon this fantastic live experience. But I hope to offer substantive thoughts soon. But I would advise all San Francisco music fans to avoid the band Black Fur, if at all possible. Without a doubt, Black Fur was one of the most ridiculous and self-pitying bands I have seen on stage in the past two years. The reasons and the report, I hope, will come later.

In the meantime, check out the Hold Steady’s new video, which I suspect owes an inspiration to the infamous Whicker’s World parody from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. (Yes, Alan Whicker is a real person.)

[UPDATE: I’ve now listened to the new album twice and, while I’m still letting my impressions kick in, overall, I think I like it more than Tito did — at least in the early rounds. More to come later.]

BBC: “Collins had already voiced interest in a reunion before he announced his spilt from Orianne, his wife of six years, in March.”

Option 1: Rambling 2,200 word article.

Option 2: Four-word summary by Edward Champion: “Because she got old.”*

* — And before I am characterized by politically correct readers as an ageist punkass, I should note that one can remain both young at heart and reasonably mature. One such act of maturity involves not embarassing yourself in a major newspaper by lambasting something in an uninformed manner that you can never and will never understand, permitting those who enjoy their cultural fixations to keep tapping their toes. Accordingly, I recuse myself from any further commentary on Napoleon Dynamite.

I haven’t listened to the new album, but my colleague Tito Perez has, finding it “disappointing listening on the first pass.” Now I’m even more curious and will give it a few listens over the weekend.

Also of note: The Hold Steady Guide to the Twin Cities.

I’ve had my disagreements with Mr. Ewins about Elbow in the past. But now I must dissent with the man on Muse’s Black Holes and Revelations. The album’s okay, I guess. “Starlight,” with a piano riff that seems less a integral component to the song and more of a nod to mellowing alt-rock listeners (“Yes,” the band seems to assure us, “it’s okay to listen to pop music after thirty.”), shouldn’t get stuck in your head, but it does.

But if an album can be judged on the basis of whether it serves as good road trip music, then Black Holes doesn’t fit the bill. As I was speeding 85 mph in Wisconsin listening to “Map of the Problematique,” contemplating the pretentious song title and its percussive insistence that, dammit, Muse is about something, I felt as if I was being conned. I enjoyed Muse’s melodic aggressiveness on its previous three albums, but at least, back then, the band understood then that vocalist Matthew Bellamy had his limitations. Instead, they’ve thrown this doofus at the forefront of the mix, encouraging his angsty sham. Bad enough that Thom Yorke lost his whiny panache with the solo album, but what can one say when one is greeted by a Thom Yorke imitator whining, “Loneliness be over / When will this loneliness be over?” Meet me on a street corner, Matt, so I can show you a homeless woman who’s truly suffering.

It doesn’t help that Muse possesses the attention span of an infant wired up on Rockstars. They can’t settle on any musical style for more than thirty seconds. On “Invincible,” the most insufferable track on the album, it’s space rock one moment, arpeggio-based ballad the next, 70s prog rock the next, inflated 1977 hard rock solo the next, all with Bellamy whining into your ears like a constipated teenager who needs to be told where the laxative is, and then needs a comprehensive explanation on what a medicine cabinet is and how to open it. The band is so without nuance or feeling that they have the effrontery to subject you to what seems to me, on the whole, to be a transparent music geek trap. And the hell of it is that they’ve succeeded.

But not with me.

Of course, it’s quite possible that Muse is sending up the bloat that the music industry relies upon like crude oil and oxygen. Certainly the final track “Knights of Cydonia,” which emerges after ten tracks of shitty bloat, suggests this.

But real bands give a damn about something outside of themselves. Only David Bowie or Sweet could get away with this kind of masturbatory glam nonsense. (I’ll see your “Soldier’s Poem” and replace it with “Seven Line Poem,” thank you very much.) And while my ears perked up a bit during the first few listens, I don’t see how any decent music lover can respect herself by clinging to such willing bombast.

I don’t know whether my colleague Tito Perez plans to weigh in with more entries in his “Knee Jerk Reactions” series. But I’m pleased to see Mr. Asher taking the cue with EPMD’s Strictly Business. I hope to weigh in with more half-assed reactions to albums very soon. So should we all.

Rory Ewins has a hard-on for Muse.