MF: Two friends of Eleanor’s, one who works for Google and one who invented the Major League Baseball score-giving service, told Eleanor, “If you’re not on Twitter, you’re nobody.” And these are the people who run the world! That’s what it’s about. She called me up and said, “We have to be on Twitter. The technocrats told me.” We’re a rock band, and we have to be interested in this kind of pop ephemera. Who are we to hold our noses? We signed up and posted: “I’m going to the grocery store.” “Raining—again?”

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Then we found out that you have to follow the people who are following you, otherwise it’s rude; it sends a message to their e-mail account to see who replies. And we’re like, “We have fans?” I thought everyone hated us. This one guy said he was from Cairo, and he had a link to some other site; it streamed a thing by this Syrian guy. I looked him up and he was written about in The Wire, the British music magazine. He’s on tour, and the normal indie-rock websites are writing about him. I didn’t read about him in The Wire. I learned about him directly from Twitter. So now I feel totally like a 2009 music fan. I want to go buy this in a record store, but I haven’t. I just listen to it on MySpace.

We also had to start maintaining our own MySpace page; we don’t have any interns. I see you can take music off other people’s MySpace page. You can borrow songs. I didn’t know that. I feel really up to date listening to Syrian wedding-music pop being repackaged for indie rock and world music and techno fans in the West.

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In all seriousness, I have a couple Sublime Frequencies radio-montage records. I don’t know of a better record label. There’s nothing like those records. There’s a lot of sound-installation things like that, but these can be listened to as music as well as somebody’s sound sculpture. That makes it a more interesting pop artifact.