Transistorized

Overheard Music, my rickety little experiment in music-related rants and reviews, has gone the way of the digital afterlife, taking its place with so much internet ephemera. I’ve salvaged a few of the better and/or more commented-on posts in their original format for the archive, for the purposes of future mockery, blackmail, and surreptitious comments by the sly of heart.

In its place, a phono opportunity presents itself! Phono Op is, first, a kind of pop-music surveillance, a meta-criticism blog for following, aggregating, inspecting and re-reviewing pop music criticism. That’s right: I read the schlock so you don’t have to! Phono Op breaks it down and breaks it open. After all, pop is always staked, in part, on the question of what the critics are saying. Phono Op bothers to evaluate how they say it, find out who these people are, anyway, and consider whether their words are worth the ear we’d lend the music.

In the process, pop gets an opportunity to be heard above the din of the media professionals (and their interns). This here is a place for the amateurs, the unconditional devotees of music whose attention and intelligence deserves critics as worthy as the artists. [[Press play.]]