Spooned

Grrrr. . . . I'm having to re-post and post-date Tuesday's blog entry, as for some reason that I totally don't understand all of my videos have stopped working on Blogger. Last night, I posted a short video of the band Spoon, along with some commentary on how the dropping of their new CD, Transference, that day was the biggest historical event of January 19, 2010, somehow overshadowing the Massachusetts senatorial debacle. I noted how they were playing that night on Conan, and got a comment from someone saying that he had watched them on Conan and asked what song it was that they had performed (for the record, it was Written In Reverse).

But I had difficult posting the video, and when I finally did get it up on line, it didn't want to play. Worse, and more mysteriously, all of the Friday Night Videos that I've posted in the past were also suddenly dysfunctional. No videos would play anywhere on my blog, and I have no idea what's going on.

I tried to play the video from my computer at work to make sure that the problem wasn't just on my home computer, but I couldn't get any of the videos to play while on the job. I tried deleting the post with the Spoon video to see if that would somehow fix the problem, but of course it didn't. I tried re-posting the video and that didn't help, and I tried posting a separate, random video, but that wouldn't play either. So now, I'm stuck posting an explanation onto a blog with videos that no longer play, and the commenter from last night is probably wondering where the original post went.

But the point still remains that the new Spoon album is arguably the first big musical event of 2010. Vampire Weekend's Contra dropped a week ago and is now No. 1 on Billboard, the first independently distributed album to do so since 1991, but it remains to be seen what people will still be talking about 12 months from now - Contra or Transference (or neither) (or both). My impression is that the upbeat pop of Vampire Weekend, while pleasant enough, will quickly fizzle away, but the more challenging structures of Spoon's new songs will continue to intrigue us into 2011.

But that remains to be seen, just as will be my ability to fix all these newly dysfunctional videos.