Weekend reading: R.E.M., Adam Duritz, and the Mexican emo riots

Published 3:51 pm Friday, March 28, 2008

I can’t really overstate the importance of reading the profile of Adam Duritz, the frontman for Counting Crows, that I link to below.

It’s a relatively short but surprisingly revealing article.

Anyway, I won’t waste more of your time. There’s too many good articles to check out.

  • Riots in Mexico are targeting emo kids, Time Magazine says, either due to homophobia or because emo is “overly sentimental” and “robbing from other music genres.”
  • Newsweek talks with Brendan Benson, the Raconteurs frontman that isn’t Jack White, about how Apple commericials are so the new SNL. (And, not to get nit-picky, but in the photo caption for this story, they call White a singer-guitarist and Benson – the dude they’re freaking featuring – only a guitarist. But he sings lead with White, and also co-writes the songs.
  • R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe finally — finally! — gets a stitch out of his mouth while talking with PitchforkMedia.com.
  • In a 1,300 word blog post he made for the New York Times, Andrew Bird writes that he’s “not the most forthcoming person.” Wait, really?
  • We find out in a New Yorker article about the new Erykah Badu album that “10 percent of people are enlightened but self-interested and creepy.”
  • It’s hard not to like Adam Duritz after reading this profile in Rolling Stone, if only for the whole platonic-relationship-with-a-blond-California-girl-who-lost-her-mom-to-cancer thing. The stuff about how he lost 60 pounds on protein cookies, or his concussion, or the lifelong mental illness, also intrigue.
  • That in-depth story the Los Angeles Times ran last week, about an attack on Tupac that kicked off the East-West rap rivalry? Well, ends up, they had a few things wrong . That’s what you get for implicating Puff Daddy. Everybody knows that man’s only true crime is wearing white after Labor Day.