An Early Clue to the New Direction: Special "We're in the Money!" Edition

Hey -- I got quoted in this year's Village Voice Critics Poll yesterday!

You realize, of course, what this means. It means that a) I'm still culturally relevant, even at my advanced age, and b) I will be receiving a check momentarily, and thus will have earned at the very least a stunning fifteen dollars!!! for freelance writing in 2012!

Here's what I wrote...

Not a very good year for pop music, again, but even worse -- not a very good year for jokes about pop music, although I still await the (theoretically feasible) Goo Goo Dolls/Lady Gaga Tour (which, for sheer glorious marquee value would surpass even the fabled Madonna/Supertramp excursion of yesteryear) for obvious reasons. Still, in that regard, I'm now really kind of embarrassed over the just-how-fucked-up-is-Amy-Winehouse? joke I made in the 2009 Pazz & Jop; that sort of thing really stopped being remotely funny after Winehouse proved incapable of showing up in the studio to record the opening credit music for Quantum of Solace. I mean, this was a woman who for all intents had been genetically bred to sing the theme to a James Bond movie, and when she blew the opportunity we shouldn't have been laughing...

As you can see if you already clicked the link, the Voice editors only ran the second half of the above, but what the hey -- in this economy, fifteen dollars is fifteen dollars. Seriously -- if you know you're getting a check for that amount every January, you can plan around it.

In any case, a coveted PowerPop No-Prize will be awarded to the first reader who gleans the quote's relevance to the theme of tomorrow's Weekend Listomania.