That musical decade
You're probably going to get 5,000 letters about Rich Albertoni's article "Pop Explosion!" (11/6/09). Here's mine:
I've seen a couple of live shows a week in Madison for what seems like longer than most of the new freshman have been alive. I remember Last Crack playing Library Mall on Halloween. I saw the last Knuckel Drager show at O'Cayz and remember freezing my butt off while stealing a brick to remember the Club de Wash.
I've seen almost all of the bands you listed and know most of the people, so I'm writing here to agree with you that the Madison music scene has never been better, ever.
All of your 10 most influential people deserved it, but you missed a couple of people who helped make the '00s great. My top 20 would include Henry Doane, who owns the Orpheum and the Corral Room, and Liz Granby at Mickey's, who's booked five of your 10 most influential bands without a cover in the last year.
Let's include the people who book shows for the Alchemy, the Harmony, Mr. Robert's, the Willy St. Pub, the Crystal, the Memorial Union, the Annex and the Project Lodge. And how about Maximum Ink?
Finally, shame on you, how could you not even mention WORT or WSUM? Or Isthmus, for that matter, to tell us where the next show's at?
Clayton Smith
Your cover subhead, "The '00s Were a Revolution in Madison Music," reminded me that, while the decade's almost over, we still don't know how to pronounce it. The zeroes? The oughts? The noughties? None ever seemed to catch on.
But I've noticed that the decade's disasters seemed to come in pairs - the Twin Towers, Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina and Rita, Bush and Cheney, Roberts and Alito, dot-com and housing, insurance and banks, Favre retiring and returning (itself meta-doubled), Transformers 1 and 2 - so I humbly propose that we call it the "oh-ohs."
Richard S. Russell
The year 2009 marks the passage of 200 decades plus nine years. You've published "a retrospective of pop music in the first decade of the new century" one year early. Either you don't expect to hear any noteworthy new music in 2010 or you're suffering from premature evaluation.
Philip Heckman
