Bill from Marginalia makes a great point about conventional wisdom. He takes issue with a quote from this Time Canada article about The Arcade Fire:
As illegal online file sharing and CD copying translate into diminished sales, the big companies complain they have little extra cash to gamble on new artists.
As Bill points out, that’s just plain wrong. That kind of lazy journalism is so irritating. Shame on you, Laura Blue and Hugh Porter, you should know better.
As for The Arcade Fire, I’ve given them a fair listen and decided that they lick gorilla testicles. Why are they popular? Smells like a Rebel Sell job to me.
On a related note, here’s an editorial by Cory Doctorow on the shoddiness of big media and technology companies.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I think you do a disservice to those people that actually do lick Gorilla testicles.
Quick possibly–I’ve never met an ape ball licker. At least, not that I’ve known.
Well it’s not like they wear t-shirts proclaiming their proclivity upon it, however I would be willing to bet that they DO have a club or organization supporting their Primate passion, such as the North American Ape Tongue’rs Association and I seem to recall some breakfast cereal called Ape-Nuts or something like that.
Hmm, so with one hand a compliment from Darren (yay!), on the other a band I like is not only compared to being fond of cross-species teabagging, but apparently my liking them is because of some broad societal trend that I’ve been swept up in. Now that’s a mixed, er, bag.
Bill,
You can not win them all. We all have bumps and bruises as we careen through this life. Some of us like bands that carry the NKOTB mantle and some of us (not me I swear…Jane Fossey maybe?) lick KoKo’s brother’s balls.