Himanshu/Tha Grimm Teachaz

Corey Hart, sure. But Dwight Pullen -- never!

Patrick: I, too, am for another poll. Been too busy for the last couple, but props to Joey for organizing the most recent one.

In fact, I've been so busy so often lately that I was reminded of something: the very fact of my busy-ness, in retrospect, is essentially what got me into the Dean's record reviews in the first place. Unlike some of ya'll, whom I envy, I seldom have the time, and never the dough, to pick up and evaluate records on my own—that is, without a recommendation from somebody trustworthy. Hell, I seldom even have time to comment here, which I sincerely wish wasn't the case. But somewhere along the way a few years ago I realized I agreed very often with the judgment of a guy who wrote about and listened to music more or less like a mad scientist—and that made things a whole lot easier for me.

Of course, that also means my top tens at the end of each month tend to look pretty similar to our host's (a "coincidence," no doubt, one or two misguided local wiseguys would call sycophancy), not because I like everything I hear but because very often what Xgau recommends is almost all I hear—aside from the myriad classical recordings my girlfriend has introduced me to. I guess the point I'm babbling toward is that some of us who crave great music simply don't have schedules that permit us the time to search for and rigorously evaluate records, and so we're grateful to entrust that task to someone who is damn good at it. Duh, ultimately we form our own evaluations of whatever we hear, but Xgau's insights often pave the way for my own. Dunno about you, but I'm fine with that.

Thanks, Bob (and Cam, Milo, Irene, Nicky, Joey, Ryan, and all the rest of you folks with ears approximately as sharp as your pens), for shedding light on sounds that I for one probably would have blissfully ignored were it not for your dedicated efforts. Ain't nothing like a good song.

If you're going to call them trashy, we need a definition.  The youngsters who hang out at the Intelligentsia coffee shop on Clark St. in Chicago, go to art galleries on Friday not entirely for the free Two-Buck Chuck (they also look at the art), and listen to too much Grizzly Bear are neither trashy and if anything are all too sincere.

Joey, the reason I didn't want to go into it is, because I knew this stupid arguing would occur. Hipsters are just trashy (and not in the good New York Dolls way), morally insincere (and not in the cute, teenage way—the annoying, purposefully irritating way), and think they're too cool (yes, there are certain style traits that apply here), etc., etc. Yes, things that occur in hipsters can occur in many other social groups, but, to me at least, hipsters are just like any other group—like skate kids, goths, emos and punks, etc. While punks have a certain view on things, hipsters' view is to be as cool as sh!t, cooler than you, and to make you eat their cool sh!t. ...easy.

Re: hipsters.  I long to live in a world where will be judged by the content of our characters, rather than the obscurity of our record collections.