Heck, even “AutoTune the News” is more arousing than many of Billboard.com’s “50 Sexiest Songs Of All Time.”

Onetime Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg, who was more recently one of Air America Radio’s revolving bosses, says the liberal talk radio distributor could have had a chance, had its organizers been willing to lose money and plea for donations.

At Paste magazine, Rachel Maddux asks the musical question, “Is Indie Dead?” Her answer: Yes. Deal with it and move on already:

Indie is, at once, a genre (of music first, and then of film, books, video games and anything else with a perceived arty sensibility, regardless of its relationship to a corporation), an ethos, a business model, a demographic and a marketing tool. It can signify everything, and it can signify nothing. It stands among the most important, potentially sustainable and meaningful movements in American popular culture—not just music, but for the whole cultural landscape. But because it was originally sculpted more in terms of what it opposed than what it stood for, the only universally held truth about “indie” is that nobody agrees on what it means.

Been wondering when Seattle would get a permanent, tangible Kurt Cobain memorial other than that bench in Viretta Park? Wonder no longer. Here’s the “giant Cobain-inspired guitar” neon sign for the new Hard Rock Cafe on Pike Street. You know, the bar/restaurant/club/merch shop that was supposed to have opened last summer.

The Seattle Symphony’s just hired a 17-year-old substitute conductor!

In perspective, this British youth named Alexander Prior wasn’t born when Nirvana’s Nevermind came out, or when the first issue of The Stranger was published.

Alaska Airlines is sponsoring an official fan site for Belltown’s own Olympic speed-skating champ, Apolo Anton Ohno. The site’s name, “followapolo.com,” reminded me of this novelty classic.

Our pals at Archie McPhee’s have listed what they believe are the “Worst Celebrity Product Licenses of All Time.” Deservedly holding the top spot: Supremes brand white bread!

Carl Franzen at the Atlantic compiles other sites’ “Odd, Overreaching ‘Decade’ Lists.” Among them is Billboard’s list of “One Hit Wonders of the 2000s.” This one’s a particularly odd list, mainly because the pop charts have become so meaningless. Back when commercial music radio meant something, the Top 100 chart meant what you’d be allowed to listen to on the ol’ AM/FM. But now, the likes of Gnarles Barkley and Macy Gray can carve out decent careers for themselves without returning to the top of singles-sales.

If any medium besides periodical print was turned totally upside down these past 10 years, it was music. Here’s former ROKRGRL publisher Carla DeSantis’s list of  “Top 10 Trends from the Past 10 Years that Changed Music Forever.” Included: The decline and pending doom of the compact disc, the TV-soundtrack-song mania, American Idol, and the seemingly contradictory trends of the female train-wreck diva and the Lilith Fair-esque folkstress.

We didn’t learn about it until today, but Bob Kondrak passed away late last month at age 61. He was an avid photographer, an early documentor of the Seattle punk scene. His son Kuri currently DJs around town.

Also recently deceased is Serbian novelist Milorad Pavic, 80. Pavic became an international success with his novel Dictionary of the Khazars, a nonlinear revisionist history of the western world.

His works dealt deftly with the clashes of races, religions, nationalities, genders, and schools of philosophy over the tumultous centuries, and treated all the parties in said conflicts with equal humanity. But when it came to his own time and place in history, Pavic chose sides, defending Milosovec’s violent but futile drive to hold onto the mini-empire that was Yugoslavia.

Whom do you believe?

Brian Eno, who says the “long tail” of online media means infinite artistic styles are in circulation at once, result in “the death of uncool”?

Or Lee Gomes in a year-and-a-half-old Wall St. Journal essay, refuting the whole Long Tail theory and insisting that “hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online”?

… so here it is so you can blame me first. It’s a steadicam music video in which a lot of Shorecrest High students dance backwards and lip-sync to Outkast’s “Hey Ya.” (“Dad, what was a ‘Polaroid picture’?”)

Was intrigued (if not completely satisfied) by the new Prisoner miniseries, which finished a three-night run on AMC Tuesday. It was well produced and exquisitely acted, even though the ending explained too much. (I won’t spoil it for you future BitTorrent DVD viewers.)

The old show mixed Swinging London iconography with Cold War politics, 007-esque spying with Big Brother paranoia.

The new show mixed Matrix psycho-techno-babble with corporate oppression, social-gaming fantasies with the suffocating terror that is Reagan-Bush era “family values.”

And it was fun to hear the Brian Wilson music samples. Because most of those were from Smile, which had been composed at the time of the original Prisoner series but not finished until 2004, they added a time/space distortion field that perfectly fit the story’s psycho-consciousness distortion field.

I know, it seems like just a little over nine years ago when we were pooh-poohing the “Y2K Bug” and hunkering down for a big night of decade- (and millennium-) launching glory.

Now, this pathetic excuse for a time period has only 44 days left.

At media outlets everywhere, that means it’s time to crank up the crackpot pundits for a round or 12 of retrospection.

F’rinstance, here’s NPR’s gaggle of music critics attempting to compile themost important 50 CDs of the decade, in alphabetical order by artist.

Nor’Westers will be pleased to find Death Cab for Cutie, the Decemberists, and the Postal Service on the list. I’m pleased to find the Strokes’ Is This It, produced by erstwhile Seattle music legend Gordon Raphael, on there.

Feliks Banel offers fond recollections of the late great KJET, the AM modern-rock station that ruled a small but eventually-influential portion of Seattle’s listening audience from 1982 to 1988.