Regardless of how you feel about James Blake’s cover of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” on his recent Enough Thunder EP (we were kind of ambivalent, but in his review of the album, Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal wrote that the song “has the feel of a stiff recital, his vocal undulations ironically sounding less natural without those well-situated sonic accoutrements” and revealed Blake’s “limitations as an artist” — zing!), we think you should watch the new music video for the track, because it stars the lovely and in our opinion underutilized British actress Rebecca Hall (Vicky Christina Barcelona, The Town, Frost/Nixon). We absolutely adore her. And now, thanks to director Seb Edwards’ POV shooting style, we have a pretty good idea of what it would be like to be in a tumultuous relationship with her. We hope for Sam Mendes’ sake that Hall is much more boring than this in real life. Read More »

If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite literary characters might be listening to while they save the world/contemplate existence/get into trouble, or hallucinated a soundtrack to go along with your favorite novels, well, us too. But wonder no more! Here, we sneak a look at the hypothetical iPods of some of literature’s most interesting characters. What would be on the personal playlists of Holden Caulfield or Elizabeth Bennett, Huck Finn or Harry Potter, Tintin, or Humbert Humbert? Something revealing, we bet. Or at least something danceable. Read on for a cozy reading soundtrack, character study, or yet another way to emulate your favorite literary hero. This week: Scheherazade, the Persian queen of a thousand stories. Read More »

If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite literary characters might be listening to while they save the world/contemplate existence/get into trouble, or hallucinated a soundtrack to go along with your favorite novels, well, us too. But wonder no more! Here, we sneak a look at the hypothetical iPods of some of literature’s most interesting characters. What would be on the personal playlists of Holden Caulfield or Elizabeth Bennett, Huck Finn or Harry Potter, Tintin or Humbert Humbert? Something revealing, we bet. Or at least something danceable. Read on for a cozy reading soundtrack, character study, or yet another way to emulate your favorite literary hero. This week: Winnie the Pooh’s most mournful pal, Eeyore.

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Oh boy, Rolling Stone. We know you guys are out of touch, and we sure do try to cut you some slack for that. But when you make a list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, and only two of those people are women? (Bonnie Raitt at #89 and Joni Mitchell at #75.) How are we supposed to respond? In all fairness, the blame doesn’t fall solely on the magazine’s writers: Although a few of them voted on the list, the jury was made up mostly of actual famous guitarists — Keith Richards, Carlos Santana, Thurston Moore, J Mascis. The panel itself only included four women (Melissa Etheridge, Marnie Stern, Nancy Wilson, and Susan Tedeschi), which might partially explain why the results were so skewed.

Of course, the list is already being nitpicked. At Stereogum, they’ve suggested a few oversights, but they’re all dudes, too. So, let’s play this game for a minute, shall we? Aside from the ladies on the voting panel, all of whom would have made good picks for the list, which other women should have been considered? How about Joan Jett, Tanya Donelly, Carrie Brownstein, Lita Ford, Ani DiFranco, Poison Ivy, Kaki King, Dolly Parton, Etta Baker, Donita Sparks, Wanda Jackson, PJ Harvey… And that’s just off the top of our head! Add your picks in the comments, and if you’re still depressed, check out the list Marnie Stern made for us last year of her favorite female guitarists.

Wolf Parade fans — and that includes us — rejoiced when the band played a few shows this weekend. It remains to be seen whether these will turn out to be farewell performances or if they magically result in the end of the band’s indefinite hiatus, so we’ll try not to read too much into the cover of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” they played in Vancouver. It looks like it was a touching moment, and we love Wolf Parade, but we probably don’t need to hear any new bands tackle Dylan’s classic, which was also a big, weird hit for Guns ‘N Roses. The video got us thinking about other seminal songs that should never be covered again. Our top ten is after the jump.

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Tomorrow would have been Johnny Cash’s 79th birthday, a historical marker that we usually celebrate by taking out our cowboy boots and pretending to know Carl Perkins. Cash’s legacy is great and varied, but one of his enduring contributions to pop culture was his short-lived but thoroughly awesome stint in television, The Johnny Cash Show. The show lasted a little under two years, but in that time it hosted enough great musical guests to blow most actual festivals out of the water. But are you surprised that the Man in Black had great taste? We didn’t think so. After the jump: Ten amazing performances, from Tammy Wynette to the Staple Singers.

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Today at Flavorpill, we were surprised by how easy it looks to make a heart-shaped egg. We listened to five seconds of every number one song ever. We wanted to score one of these belt buckles that holds your MetroCard. We were impressed by the size of Michael Craughwell’s swords. We learned how to be a Twitter guru in six easy tweets. We watched the surprisingly well-done extended trailer for a gritty, R-rated sequel to E.T. We couldn’t believe that it was actually Tina Fey singing that awful Joni Mitchell–style ballad called “Paints and Brushes” in last week’s episode of 30 Rock. We witnessed the birth of a Ford Model-T. We streamed Lykke Li’s entire new album. And finally, we thought we should pass along this handy chart on why PBS is worth saving, in case you were looking for some extra ammunition. For more information on the issue, visit 170 Million Americans.

Today at Flavorpill, we marveled at Sam Havia’s culturally relevant cassette tape paintings and the trippy art of teenage drug rehab patients. We wished we could un-see these creepy videos of monkeys wearing human masks and working as waiters. We learned that Bob Dylan actually wrote every popular song in the past several decades, including “Baby Got Back.” We wondered whether this sculpture was the world’s first portrait. We were excited for the return of one of our favorite shows, Treme, April 24. We loved James Blake’s cover of “A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell. Is there anything that guy can’t do? We placed bets on who will take the #1 spot in Salon’s Good Sex Awards. We spent far too long chuckling over these 45 ridiculous boy band photos. And finally, we learned that Dr. Dre started Burning Man — at least, according to someone on Tumblr who really, really seems to think it’s all some kind of crazy conspiracy.

Collecting four decades of work, James Hamilton’s You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen combines the dedication of a photojournalist with the passion of a true music fan and the eye of a fine-art photographer.

The new book, edited by longtime friend and frequent subject Thurston Moore, chronicles Hamilton’s 40 years immersed in the downtown NYC music and art scene. Lovingly culled from the artist’s vast private archive, the volume also features never-before published candid photographs of icons from Joni Mitchell to the Ramones.

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Yesterday, the folk world was rocked by Joni Mitchell. Apparently she has a giant grudge against Bob Dylan and, as Matt Diehl found out when interviewing  Mitchell for the LA Times, she does not like being compared to him. Indeed, when Diehl intimated that the two were similar because they both “changed” their names (from Roberta Joan Anderson to Joni Mitchell and Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan) to create a persona, Joni uttered these venom-laced words: “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.”

A plagiarist? Them’s fighting words. And although the accusation itself is startling, we found ourselves asking a different question: How long has she felt this way? We decided to do some digging to find out exactly what is going on here.

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