Rock Sick List: Bradford Cox

Deerhunter's Bradford Cox got hit by a car and is in both a bad way, and hospital:

Cox said he was hit by a car and was “still waiting for X-ray results or any real diagnoses” and that he “can’t move much” and is in “incredible pain.”

According to wonderingsound.com, Cox has been hospitalized at the Marcus Trauma Center in Grady Memorial Hospital.

Downloadable: Deerhunter

The always-generous Bradford Cox makes available more quality free Deerhunter stuff: an album's worth of 2005 rare stuff.

A little Ghetto heaven

Founded by the coming together of Deerhunter's Bradford Cox and Cole Alexander from Black Lips, Ghetto Cross are like some sort of supergroup. If you're not that fussy about requiring supergroup members to have their own country mansions. What do they sound like?
This, actually. The song's called Dog Years and features the line "I love you like a fat man loves a doughnut..."

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.

Deerhunter play last round... for this season

In a post to their blog, Bradford has announced that Deerhunter are going into deep cover:

We are all exhausted now and ready to be home. I would like to announce that the show we are playing at Primavera in Barcelona (I hope to god i spelled that right) will be our last for quite some time. It will also be the last time we are ever playing the Cryptograms set we have been playing for the last two years. After that the band are going on hiatus. We all need some time to organize our lives. Thanks to everyone who has helped us out. This has been a crazy year that I will always remember.

It's not a goodbye forever, then. But it's quite a long goodbye.

Who the hell does Jeff Dreadnaught think he is?

It's probably best to ignore bad reviews, pop people. It's equally best to ignore the good ones, but ignoring the bad ones is a good place to start.

Believe me, having a coked-up guitarist shouting in your face in a winebar doesn't tend to do anything to raise the reviewer's opinion of a band, and it never comes as surprise to a journalist when a band tells them that they disagree with his or her opinion that they're not very good. I've nver quite understood why bands think that screeching "you know nothing about music" at someone who doesn't like the work is going to achieve anything.

Having said which, Deerhunter's exchange of emails with Jeff Weiss of the LA Weekly does at least manage to be amusing and Weiss makes a fairly wise observation:

The fact is that you are probably in one of the most critically
acclaimed bands out right now. Why care so much about one
writer who doesn't care for your music? Is it really worth your time to
write sarcastic e-mails? It's not going to change my mind or hurt my
feelings. I'm sorry you have such a low self-worth and lack of
confidence in your band.

Do you really think you make some form of populist music that
EVERYONE will like. To quote Wayne's World: Led Zeppelin didn't write
songs that everyone liked. They left that to the Bee Gees. That's a
joke. You're supposed to laugh. Or do you even have a such of humor?

I really have no interest in continuing some sort of stupid
beef. I'm not the kind of person that carries grudges. I make jokes and I
write about music. That's about it. I'm sorry you don't find them funny.
Unlike you, I've gotten used to the fact that I can't be everything to
all the people all the time.

He's right about the letting it go, although, of course, he's wrong about Deerhunter.