Spoon "Gimme Fiction" [2005]

Gee, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the meeting where Britt Daniel convinced a record label that his sloppy, home-made recordings of amateur quality and sub-amateur execution should warrant some sort of payment and promotion -- he must have given those idiots quite the snow-job. Apparently as unable to mix his various tracks with any skill as he is to sing his vocals after blowing his nose first, this is the kind of music the guy who spends all day in his dorm room plays for you as he explains how he's flunked out of college but it's totally worth it because he's got all these amazing tracks that are going to make him super-famous. You try to freeze your expression into one of non-committal interest and gently nod your head, all the while thinking one day this guy is going to kill himself once the real world stomps all over his slow-moving, under-inventive, repetitive, meaningless demo-quality crap. So not only did Spoon getting signed set an unrealistic example for all the other mediocre home-studio dreamers out there who totally have no shot in hell especially now that Spoon has screwed the pooch, but it presented an extremely low barrier to entry for the brown-bag electronica of LCD Soundsystem instead of discouraging these sorts of self-absorbed rich kids with all the equipment and connections in the world. So much for increased access to recording technology being any sort of democratizing agent.