It may be the worst time of year for new releases and gigs, but the music news is as amusing as ever.

Is there anything funnier than Mariah Carey getting dumped from her contract? In the last year, her reputation has headed in the exact opposite direction as her breasts -- way, way down. Sure, $28 million will ease a lot of the pain and embarrassment. But it's difficult to feel sorry for her. She was nuttier than a fruitcake long before she was medically diagnosed as such. Her wickedly ditzy interviews made the guest actress commentators on Iron Chef look like CJ Cregg in a briefing room on The West Wing. For years, her videos have been a living, breathing advertisement for Temptation Island. She was jettisoned so swiftly from EMI that I can't make up my mind if it's more hilarious or scary. It's scary because a proven commercial success like Mariah, who I has the third or fourth most #1 hits in the history of music, was dumped like day old bread at the first sign of weakness. She'll probably return strong in a year or two, but POP is about the bottom line, and in two years, EMI could release 329 albums by boy bands and make their money that way before that gravy train dries up.

Also, Starsailor have garnered themselves a notable superfan in Phil Spector. He invited the band to his house, and they stayed for two hours. Before you shrug your shoulders, please note that Spector is probably the second most reclusive man in the world after Osama bin Laden. And he wants to work with Starsailor. The man's last production was in 1980. As a Spector worshipper, I'm both excited and jealous at Starsailors' good fortune (particularly because they're not all that great, they're reaching like mad to be a hybrid of 1995 Verve and Radiohead and falling far short, but mainly due to the not-easily-attainable high quality of those bands in that year).

Actually, the Spector-Starsailor pairing would be a good idea. It would churn out shimmery amped-up folk pop, sort of like the sound of Sigur Ros' "Agetis Byrjun" playing cover versions of Slowdive. But if Spector really wants to make himself useful, he should grab the nearest revolver, three of his bodyguards, get on a plane to the UK, go to Kevin Shields' house, stick a gun in his ear to wake him up at three in the afternoon, drag his ass down to the studio, and start making an album. First of all, it would be the greatest album ever. If there was a 1990's equivalent of Phil Spector, it was Kevin Shields. On the flip side, if there was a 1990's equivalent of Phil Spector, it was Kevin Shields. That is, the album would take 100 years to make and cost more than Microsoft is worth, provided that those two perfectionists could spend five minutes together without killing each other.

The soundtrack for "The Royal Tennenbaums" hasn't left my CD changer since I bought it. Now, that was only three days ago, but still. Black comedies are one thing, but this is a black soundtrack. With the exception of the 91-second head rush of the Ramones "Judy is a Punk", and a few of Mark Mothersbaugh's tongue-in-cheek playful interludes (i.e. "Pagoda's Theme") this is an album of dark, disturbing retro-pop posing as a cash-in companion to a major motion picture. It's one thing for a soundtrack to carry morbid symphonic weight, i.e. emotion rattling films such as "Schindler's List", "The Last Temptation of Christ", any war film, and about a million others. It's an entirely different seduction when you employ not one, but two Nico songs. The last time I checked, Nico wasn't the sort of chanteuse whose name and music are prone to drip thoughts of "Hollywood Glitz". Ditto Nick Drake. Ditto Elliot Smith's moody, empty, delicate "Needle in the Hay". And who was the genius who chose the Velvet's "Stephanie Says", the most criminally overlooked uber-classic in their deep back catalogue?

In fact, the whole CD is like a collection of jewels in the rough made by a vinyl-obsessed loner, whose sole purpose was to cull a soundtrack full of artists that never show up on Hollywood soundtracks. It's less a soundtrack that a mix tape traded between profoundly sensitive goth teens in love. Hmmm. Maybe there's a Hollywood film in there after all.

I sat through a "Biography of Grunge" on MMM last week. "Sat through" is a very diplomatic way of putting it. The program was awful, it was nothing more than a rapid-fire barrage of name dropping, soundclips, and quick facts. With the exception of the soundclips, the same ends could have been accomplished using a basic list of chronological events, the kind that appear in the appendices of history books. There was not a single mention of WHY grunge happened, i.e. WHY rock lacked soul and emotion in the 1980's, WHY Nirvana left from the middle of nowhere into mega-mainstream success, WHY people got bored of grunge in the mid-1990's (note to "Bio" producers: the "overexposure" excuse is overused to the point of no longer having any meaning, please be more specific next time if you want to make novel insights).

The main thing I took away from this program is how downright crappy most of grunge was, and how AWESOME Nirvana were compared to all their contemporaries. I was completely unenthused with grunge when it broke, so unfortunately, it wasn't until a few months after Kurt's death that I realised how great Nirvana really were. Now, hearing their songs alongside those of every other grunge band only accentuated how much brighter they shone (and still do shine) in comparison.

Oh, and I was glad about a couple other things: not a single mention of poseurs-extraordinaires Stone Temple Pilots. And they made fun of Silverchair.

Next time, maybe they'll think of mentioning the greatest grunge album ever made, that being Teenage Fanclub's "Bandwagonesque". But I doubt it.