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There are lots of best-of lists every year. You can draw a line of best fit for these points. There are also radio charts: KEXP, WOXY, and others.

I’m glad that people are coming around to the Soof, but where were they two years ago for Michigan? And Seven Swans—a better album yet. I guess this is a step forward, in a year when a 30-year old band is supposedly the best thing rock music has to offer.

For that matter, what the fuck? Published critics, on average, think that Sufjan put out the album of the year. Yet he failed to be nominated in any Grammy category. In fact, if you look at that metacritic list (which aggregates everybody from the super-indie Pitchfork and cokemachineglow to mainstream outlets like Spin, Billboard, and the LA Times), only six (20%) of the recognized artists were nominated for a Grammy (Kraftwerk, LCD Soundsystem, Ry Cooder, System of a Down, Kanye West, and Fiona Apple). Only two (Kanye and System) won an award. And it’s not like the Grammys are thin on awards or nomination spots: if you look at this from the other end, there are 108 awards, with an average of five nominations each—so we’re up to about 540 now—and the academy somehow nominated such ’90s luminaries as Mariah Carey, Rob Thomas, and Seal, who landed metacritic scores of 61, 54, and not-even-listed-because-nobody-thought-he-was-worth-reviewing, respectively. With numbers like these, the problem isn’t that the Grammys ignore indie music. The Grammys categorically ignore good music.

One of the reasons for this is that people actually have to send in their music for it to be nominated. And then, the people doing the nominating (the Recording Academy voting members) are themselves mostly Big-Four affiliated musicians and industry professionals.

Take the Best New Artist category, for example, which they might as well rename the Best New Signee to a Big-Four Label Contract category. SugarLand. Who?

Most depressing? Due to eligibility rules, some albums from 2004 were nominated for awards, including The Arcade Fire’s Funeral. But alas, the winner for best alternative album was… yeah, The White Stripes.

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I remember standing under the overhang outside the front door in a torrential downpour. The rain was blowing sideways, and we wanted to be outside in it, just to feel what it was like to hear the house shake from the outside. I wish it would rain here. #

“Los Angeles unfolds so slowly and softly… a petal at time, like a fan dancer. I keep waiting for the last veil to drop, and to my fascination and delight it never, ever does.” —Theresa Duncan #

I was just reading through the liner notes to Jawbreaker’s Unfun when I noticed that it was recorded and mixed at the now-defunct Radio Tokyo studio in Venice, just a couple blocks from my apartment (over on Abbot Kinney). Apparently the band also recorded a few of their early demos there. #

Ever since I’ve had XM in my car—about three years now—there have been two indie channels in the XM universe: XM 43 (“XMU”), and XM 52 (“Unsigned”). XMU is marketed as a college radio format, and more or less rotates a selection from the CMJ Top 200, with very little music more than two years old. They’re slow on the uptake, usually anywhere from two to six months behind CMJ’s adds (and therefore most “indie” formatted college and public radio stations). Ostensibly a rock station, XMU also plays indie hip-hop and electronica in occaisional hour-long hosted blocks. (If you’re keeping score at home, this is actually where I got the idea to label anything not rock-formatted at KSCR as a “specialty show.” KEXP, the king of indie radio, kind of does this too.) XMU’s normal programming hours are fully automated, with pretty heavy imaging every 3-4 songs.

Unsigned, in contrast, has been a study in how not to program a radio station: they only play artists without record deals, and, further dividing that microgenre, they only play alternative rock. The music has been, well, horrible. Instead of searching out upcoming, unsigned innovators (e.g. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah in the last 8 months), they’ve just spun a long list of mainstream alternative KROQ wannabes. There’s a reason all those artists are terminally unsigned. It was a total waste of an interesting (albeit novelty) programming concept.

A couple months ago, I noticed that Unsigned started playing artists who definitely have record deals. Not coincidentally, the quality of music improved. I also noticed that, gee, they seem to be playing Arts+Crafts artists a whole lot—BSS, Jason Collett, and Most Serene Republic. Hey, and there’s the Constantines! It didn’t occur to me instantly (since Montreal and Toronto have been at the center of the cultural universe for indie music since the early ’00s), but Unsigned has been playing a lot more signed Canadian artists. Unfortunately, every other indie Canadian track is still bumpered by the same tired mid-’90s alternative rock rehash. Apparently, Canadian mid-’90s alternative rock rehash.

The station also adopted some air talent. Actually, it seems to be just one guy (considering the majority of XM is voice tracked, that’s not unusual). He brands the station as “XM 52” with no mention of Unsigned. This is a little confusing to me, since my radio still gives “Unsigned” as the channel name. Maybe my radio is just caching the old name?

New / Emerging Rock from Canada New, emerging and recently discovered Canadian rock artists have a home on (un)Signed. From heavy metal to mainstream, modern rock to eclectic, folk and roots rock, new and emerging rock artists are making noise on (un)Signed. You’ll hear artists like Our Lady Peace, Default, Theory of a Deadman, Death From Above 1979, The New Pornographers, Metric, Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene.

It looks like XM made the shift in part due to their new official presence in Canada. They also changed seven other stations for the Canadian market, although US subscribers receive all the stations that XM offers. On the other hand, Canadian subscribers’ radios are programmed at activation time to block five US music channels, and quite a bit of US sports and talk programming.

Canadian terrestrial stations have long had to conform to the CRTC’s rules for Canadian content: 35% of music selections from 6am to 6pm must be Canadian, as defined by the oft-maligned MAPL system. It appears that the rule for satellite providers is 10%, to reflect that XM and Sirius’s broadcasts originate in (and mostly serve) the US. When you do the math (8 XM stations changed, many US-centric sports and talk stations removed, some amount of Canadian content already existed on XM), it probably works out to something like 10%.

If I have time, I’d like to write a quick script to scrape XMFan’s artist/title reporter and do an analysis of exactly what XMU and (un)Signed are playing (XMFan doesn’t archive song history because it violates XM’s TOS).

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