Matt P.

a cartoon of homer simpson holding a card ALT: a cartoon of homer simpson holding a card

"Hey, early 2000s indie--get off of my lawn!"

Cowboys Stadium would have a lot more gold trim 😆

Yep. Self-released in 2000, reissued in 2001 by Ninja Tune, so...eligible in whichever year grabs it first (?)

Seems like Pearce "reading the room" & building a narrative from that. His relationship w/ Salah has always been chilly, so I doubt he's getting anything from that end. What of what's happened this season would give any reason to think the club would side with Salah over Slot at this point?

Gianni Infantino accused of breaching FIFA’s ethics codes in relation to President Trump comments Advocacy group FairSquare has also requested an investigation into President Trump being awarded the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize last Friday.

www.nytimes.com/athletic/687...

If we're firing up the ol' time machine, let's go all the way back to the early '80s and have Trump's bid to buy the Colts succeed. Keeps him away from politics, and maybe it even keeps the Colts in Baltimore.

Dwight Yoakam's HILLBILLY DELUXE vs. Butthole Surfers' LOCUST ABORTION TECHNICIAN.

And even before that--1997--you could download WinAmp to play mp3s on a desktop computer.

By the time YHF was streaming on Wilco's site and iPods were a thing in late 2001, MusicNet was already offering a subscription streaming service:

www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/in...

The Gargoyle #1-4

Revisiting a favorite mini-series, The Gargoyle (1985), written by J. M. DeMatteis, art by Mark Badger. Issue #1 cover by Bernie Wrightson.

^ Agree. Not even my favorite Wilco, but I'll probably nominate it in whichever year. You'd think it gets slightly better odds vs the field in 2002, but I think it exists, blob-like, in the spaces between all the various little taste enclaves in the electorate enough that it's far from a lock.

old cassette

Yeah, STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON is better treated as an '89 release. I don't think there's any evidence to support an official '88 release. The '88 date is most likely coming from the 1988 copyright that's printed on the '89 release. The label had intended to release it in Sept '88, but delayed it.

Many, many versions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (screenshot from Allmusic)

That's probably sourced from the limited "tour edition" that Nonesuch put out in 2003.

I bought AfD before anyone else I knew after seeing the "Welcome to Jungle" video late at night on MTV before it was in their regular rotation. Funny to see it finally crossover into the mainstream almost a year later... then top the Billboard chart again in February of '89 after "Paradise City."

Aw, that's harsh. Dunno how I feel about it against YHF, but I really like THE PHOTO ALBUM—their last real guitar record before their gradual Postal Service-ification.

Might as well get it over with in the 2001 bracket, then.

this is really interesting

I had been mostly convinced that the crime spike in the US was primarily caused by the post-Floyd cop strike, especially because of the lack of an international analog

but this suggests a whole lot of US society just came unglued after 2020

I stopped getting advance CDs around 2003 and my kids were born in 2007, so my sense of what years were good becomes a lot fuzzier somewhere in this period.

DPS Board Expected to Vote on Policy Towards Immigration Enforcement Last month’s deportation sweeps animated an ongoing debate over what Durham Public Schools’ policies regarding immigration enforcement should be.

Last month’s deportation sweeps animated an ongoing debate over what Durham Public Schools’ policies regarding immigration enforcement should be.

Under pressure from the Durham Association of Educators and some families, the school board is expected to vote on a policy this week.

Thanks for this. It's a really interesting read, and I think speaks to some of the reasons why shorthands like "dad-rock" become not especially useful once they get codified and become pseudo-genres.

Yeah--all kidding aside, I think most years have plenty of good stuff as long as you're willing to dig around a little. I was 16 in 1987, so a lot of those records are, like, center of the canon for me.

Every year is meh. Eventually you get used to it 🤷

If you're looking for an album that was rejected by the artist's label and turns out to be really good--but without the pesky release date controversy--to nominate for the competition, may I recommend Ron Sexsmith's BLUE BOY.

Oh yeah, undeniably a big factor, as was the internal turmoil in the band at the time--Ken Coomer and Jay Bennett were fired, Glenn Kotche and (unofficially) Jim O'Rourke were brought in--all captured in the "making of" documentary that came about three months after Nonesuch's release of the album.

All the cool kids heard London Calling in the last two weeks of December.

Christgau's reviews of some Wilco albums.

That's really interesting. He seems to have been especially unimpressed with SUMMER TEETH and YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT, but liked BEING THERE, A GHOST IS BORN, SKY BLUE SKY, & WILCO (THE ALBUM), before cooling off on them again later on (he also liked the MERMAID AVENUE album they did with Billy Bragg).

Good list...and I'm a dabbler in this kind of stuff, so a lot of stuff I missed. Disappointingly few umlauts, though.

Yeah. I wanna say it was Rob Mitchum's Pitchfork review of SKY BLUE SKY (2007) that first slapped that label on Wilco, so...sometime after that (?).

Also true of Drive-By Truckers' SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA, btw--initially self-released by the band in 2001 on Patterson Hood's Soul Dump label--which is what's going to make it eligible for the 2001 bracket--but it didn't really get widely heard until it was re-released by Lost Highway in 2002.

Voted 2001. Fundamentally--even more so than being a physical thing a bunch of weird obsessive-types can potentially buy--an album is a listening experience you could potentially have. Verifiably, you could potentially have the particular listening experience that was YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT in 2001.