Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

Bradford Cox writes about his heart condition and his healing music project:

The girl next to me was a really sad situation. She was the daughter of a high profile player for the Atlanta Braves. She contracted E-Coli from a Whitewater amusement park and was in terrible pain and screamed constantly. Her parents had to leave her at night and she just screamed and screamed and I tried to drown it out with my walkman. One day I woke up and her bed was gone and there was no screaming. She had died in the middle of the night. That's how I spent my sixteenth summer. Which might explain why I refer to that age so much on Cryptograms. It was like an invisible summer that never happened.

Stuart Maconie in The Times argues that this, this is our Golden Age:

Do you know what’s at No 1 right now? OK, it’s probably something from The X Factor but you take my point. Unless you’re Simon Cowell nobody gives a toss about the charts except for a week in late December when it becomes a kind of dull tabloid equivalent of the Boat Race. Is this such a bad thing? What matters more to you, whether the new Morrissey/ KT Tunstall/ Sigur Rós album is any good? Or its first-week chart placing?

... and, Jude Rogers makes a similar point in The Guardian's Film and Music supplement:

Thom, Damon and Noel and the post-punk pinchers rule only if you choose to track contemporary music as a guitar-obsessed timeline. Second: the idea that hunting for music these days is an easy task is nonsense. The internet may have made the act of searching simpler, but the profusion of music online means finding good stuff is still as tricky as the Velvelettes trying to find their needle in a haystack.

What this explosion does do, however, is expand our chances of finding like-minded souls who might point us in the right direction. Then factor in the number of emerging artists, plus the pressure on major labels to stop being "boring" (thanks, Mr McCartney) and engage with an internet audience. Now tell me this decade isn't amazingly alive.