I'd been planning for some time now to add a blogroll devoted to my favorite pop-music writers; honestly, the only thing that held me up was that pesky matter of categorization. Obviously, it wouldn't really help anyone if I lumped popblogs in with the current list of (mostly) classical blogs -- too hard to know what you're going to find, unless you're already familiar with a site. But does adding a pop list compel further stratification: i.e., the addition of a jazz-specific list and a relocation of Mwanji Ezana's excellent be.jazz, which quietly infiltrated the blogroll some time ago (and is at present the only dedicated jazz blog on the list)?
I don't know what the best solution is, but Marc Geelhoed finally forced me to make a move this morning by citing the arrival of Aurally Fixated, a new blog by Time Out Chicago pop-music editor Antonia Simiglis. Following on from her page, I discovered that my old friend Steve Dollar, a capable observer of pop, jazz, new music and other acoustic phenomena, is blogging at Dollarama! Since I was already on a roll, I finally hooked up with Sasha Frere-Jones's S/FJ (because it's de rigueur to do so, but also an excellent read), my TONY colleague Cristina Black's pithy Subnoto, and former Jazz Times editor Christopher Porter's wonderful, wide-ranging MP3 blog, The Suburbs Are Killing Us.
You'll find all of these marvels in a new category called "Poptones," located near the bottom right. There's more to come, certainly. Meanwhile, I could sit here and ponder genre stratification and blurring borders all day, but I've got an experimental opera and a death-metal blast to attend today. So explore, and enjoy!
