Idolator

Soulja Boy! He's popular. Well, he sells singles. Not so much albums. But a lot of singles! So many singles. And YouTube hits. He attracts the YouTube hits. All related to a dance. A dance you may have heard, seen, or tried to do yourself! You'd think at this point there's not a single thing left to be said about Soulja Boy and the mini-trend of choreographed toe-tapping that he's sparked among aspiring popular musicians, one that's profitable for labels for the moment but not a particularly safe long term bet for reversing dipping sales. And you'd be right! Yet that fact has not stopped the Wall Street Journal from devoting many hundreds of words to recapping the tale of Soulja Boy. He's divisive! He's reopened the generation gap! He's given MC Hammer a reason to go on! And yet despite its rehashery, the WSJ's story does raise one important, semi-new, mostly implied question: Would rock bands be improved by their own dance routines? Is there room in indie for cranking that James Murphy? More »

Everybody lost at last week's Video Music Awards: MTV lost. Mos Def lost. Even our nation's collective cultural masculinity (which wasn't doing so well to begin with) was handed another defeat. But the piss-poor show is at least partially responsible for the weekend-sales success of performer Ok Go, whose Oh No album—featuring the treadmill-assisted "Here It Goes Again" single—has finally cracked the upper-tier of the iTunes album chart (it's resting at No. 2, right between Dylan and Trousersnake; meanwhile, Amazon's album chart has at it at No. 62, a jump from last week). More »

Thanks to their treadmill-hopping video "Here It Goes Again," Chicago's OK Go have had a pretty good summer: As of this posting, the "Again" clip has racked up nearly 3.5 million views on YouTube, leading to appearances on The Early Show and The Colbert Report, as well as a late-addition live slot at next week's VMAs. Considering that this is an above-average power-pop group without a Killers-sized marketing budget, they deserve whatever attention they can get (though if they follow it up with another goofy-dance video, we're going to have their goddamn legs broken). More »