Roll into your weekend with a few #longreads

We’ll be doing a big feature on Spoon next week in advance of their upcoming release, and to help you prepare you can read up on this Guardian interview where Britt Daniel discusses the songs from their albums over the years that helped define the band.  He makes a few surprising choices, while also providing a nice overview of Spoon’s career.

Continuing our tradition of link to pieces that analyze about the business aspect of streaming and how it affects artists, Salon has a great article that specifically looks at how streaming has hurt genres that are already marginalized, like jazz and classical.

Kanye West provokes a lot of reactions in people, but he’s always an interesting interview no matter how you slice it.  GQ has an extended interview with him for this month’s issue.

We normally would not post anything about Pitbull, but this profile in Businessweek is worth checking out if only for the scene where Pitbull learns about BitCoin.

Your intermission this week is a random performance of “MacArthur Park” on David Letterman.  It was rather epic.

“Weird Al” sits in for Pitchforks 5-10-15-20 feature, recounting various songs that were significant at those years of his life (and beyond).

And finally, we have an interview with Peter Matthew Bauer.  Normally we would be excited about posting (and reading) this interview, considering how much we love The Walkmen and Bauer’s solo debut, but the interviewer is Rick Moody.  Our hostility towards Moody would make more sense if we published a planned takedown of another interview he did.  But since that got pushed to the backburner, we’ll just warn you by saying to be prepared for pretentiousness and general blockheadedness.