Featured Article
A Subjective Guide to World Music Labels
These are some of the most prominent purveyors of World Music, but there are dozens, if not hundreds, more small, local, and specialty labels that are dedicated to making available the sounds of the human race. I wanted to share these five with you, not only because of their range and accessibility, but also because they have the resources and the vision to offset the exploitation that World Music artists have long endured at the hands of the record industry.
-- Robert Mead
Stylus Magazine: A Eulogy
In the waning hours of Stylus’s light, I realized how strong my relationship had become with what seemed little more than a pop page at the time. Would I have ever realized the extent of my affection for the site and its writers had Stylus continued to exist? No, I would have continued taking it for granted, cursing the reviews that countered my own feelings, peeking in periodically during work hours to keep an eye on fellow commenters, and slinging barbs and ill-formed ideology to elucidate chinks in every feature and editorial...
-- Meatbreak
IMP's Top 20 Albums & Top 10 Singles of 2007
IMP celebrates the end of its first year of social networking with a unique gift to itself: year-end lists comprised of members' own Top Tens. Given that IMP has more than 1,200 members from 30 countries, an easy hypothesis was that the list would be populated by obscure jewels from around the world. However, the driving force behind IMP has always been recontextualization over willful obscurity, so there should be no surprise that these lists are dominated by albums and singles that were just barely left of the mainstream. If anything, we find that indie rock now means more to more people than ever, even in the absence of any truly groundbreaking work this year. So, please enjoy a trip down memory lane to the year that was 2007.
-- Ryan Mixtape