Music is a mass-produced commodity designed to be consumed by the greatest number of citizens with generally undiscerning tastes and disposable income. This is what's developed over the past century, and at this point, it's culturally set in stone for at least the next couple of generations no matter how we thrash anarchically against it. But we try. And face it, we do have a choice in what particular rock and roll single, slab o' noise or benign holiday-themed recording we decide to spend our hard earned dollars, cents and Euros on! But damn if that choice isn’t difficult.

Our devolved heads explode at the very thought of finding news on our own, but over time we have may rely on credible sources of information to guide us from nausea to ecstasy - outlets and organs such as AOL, USA Today, or when we’re high, CNN. And similarly, overwhelmed music fans everywhere turn to that arbiter of taste posing as ultimate filter of the music tide known as the music critic. But there's another way as well - a way that taps into collective unconsciousness (our favorite form of consciousness) for a clearer, less conflicted version of the "truth" about a record's meaning and value.

For years now, Drag City has endorsed anagramatical record reviews and has sold the only such collection of reviews available: Warm Voices Rearranged, compiled and anagrammed by Brandan Kearney and Gregg Turkington. If you can't find that book behind the counter somewhere in your local record shoppe, then it's not much of a shop and you can order it here. A sure sign of the growing relevance of this method of review, which allows the title of the record to speak about itself in a manner not actively, but rather PASSIVELY as intended by the artist, is this web-site: warmvoices.blogspot.com

If you don’t keep a toilet-bowl library or prefer your reading to be done internet style alone, this web site supplies you with all the classic reviews from our frozen-in-time "first edition" printed document - as well as updates you can check out. You can browse reviews by artist, decade, or tone. Yes, tone.

So not only can you find a highlight from the Warm Voices Rearranged book:

Sonic Youth Dirty: Ouch! Yon tit is dry!

You can also read about one of the band's recent solo excursions:

Thurston Moore Demolished Thoughts : The humdrum solo shit! O God, he's rotten!

And in the case of each record, its inherent value is expressed with a simple rejiggering of the letters in the name and title. Simple, but very effective. And like potato chips - can't stop eating 'em! Here's another

Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus: Moaning orgasm! It’s a penis-jerking jubilee! Rub one!

Now that’s insightful music journalism! Tells you what to expect and what you'll receive when you listen. So buy the book, bookmark the site, talk it up around the watercooler - or wherever your tribe convenes for hot gossip and word games...