Well, Simon Reynolds gives a big shout to Bruce Sterling in his NY Times piece on atemporality in pop music. The conclusion being there is no signature pop sound from the 2000s except auto-tune. The hyper recycling.  And then Reynolds expands on the piece as guest writer on Bruce's blog, on the euro-fication of a lot of pop right now, or in Simon's words, "cheese-trance" and "Euro-house." And he valorizes Ke$ha!

Have always loved Simon Reynolds as a music critic. He's the guest music editor on Bruce Sterling's blog right now. This piece on New Age music as hip is pretty damn good. Liked his take on appropriation:

See, if you’re a left-field hipstermusic type band, the formation of your artistic identity involves pulling together a portfolio of influences. Which leads to artists competing to find things to be into and be inspired by that nobody else has thought of yet. This revalorization game encourages musicians to look for hitherto ignored/deplored genres or artists from the past and to convince themselves–and others–that they are:

A/ actually good, it’s just nobody else (in hipsterland) noticed it yet.
B/ in actual fact, more far out than many acclaimed artists in the middlebrow zone
(or if neither A nor B can remotely be argued plausibly )
C/ so bad they’re far-out in their badness, and thus good. 

Nice. Reynolds also has a pretty good piece on the new Panda Bear album and why its cloyingness fails, whereas for some reason Perfect Pitch didn't.

While I'm citing, this piece from RE/Search on the invention of the internet by aliens to destroy the culture is laudable:

HOW MANY JOBS HAS THE INTERNET KILLED? (You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet!)

If I were an alien from Outer Space wanting to ruin life on Planet Earth, I think I’d invent the Internet.
I’d get every earthling constantly connected via some electronic wireless gizmo to an ADD-creating, creativity-sucking, time-wasting, globally-exploitative hive-video-brain offering:
1) massive discounts no “local” merchant could afford to give
2) “free” illegal downloads of the entirety of the world’s cultural output, thus chopping off at the root any chance of lengthy artistic development and maturation
3) billions of shocking / titillating images, films, videos and words whose net effect is even more passivity-inducement and lethargy
4) fake social networking whose RESULT is: nobody gets together in the same room anymore — too much trouble. Everyone’s at home consuming images and audio on an electronic screen, writing inconsequential fluff, and twittering their lives away…(Yes, a few who can still afford it, sit “alone together” in coffeehouses, glued to their electronic devices).
5) in sum, constant, hypnotizing distraction so that silence and solitude have become unthinkable, obsolete and positively quaint…
Then I’d sit around and watch 99% of the earthlings get fat and insane as every possible place offering “real social contact in real time” goes out of business — most never to return. The 1% left are like the actors in the ancient Roman Games, living the “real” lives while the other 99% act like the zombie spectators they are, each unemployed spectator telling themselves they’re truly unique and “special” and deserve to be celebrities…
Meanwhile, none of the 99% ever suspect that the Internet was the cause…

(Ironically, since this is posted on the Internet, this “rant” will doubtless be ignored… Oh yes, it was written by a luddite BOOK publisher – almost forgot what a “book” was – I once saw one, long ago… )