At dinner last Friday in the garment district, with his girlfriend, Mara Hennessey, Mr. Johansen was looking slick but a little exhausted. His schedule for the next few days was a daunting regimen of rehearsals, radio appearances, an in-store spot at the Union Square Best Buy and the pair of shows at the Bowery Ballroom, Wednesday and Thursday, that will celebrate the release of the Dolls' latest album, Dancing Backward in High Heels.

Though Mr. Johansen has inhabited several musical personas over the years (as loony lounge Latin crooner Buster Poindexter for much of the 1980s; a stint going old-timey fronting a band called the Harry Smiths), working with his longtime collaborator--the only surviving member of the original Dolls--Syl Sylvain makes Mr. Johansen most comfortable.

"I was reading about Americans, and confidence, and how deluded they are," Mr. Johansen said. "Like way overconfident. We think we can do everything. We can't do anything! Well, I require that kind of confidence to go into the studio and in three weeks make a record with Syl, and to get into rehearsal tomorrow and get up onstage next week.

"Every time I go through a trip like the Harry Smiths thing, it nurtures me," he said, "and nourishes me, and giving me, subconsciously, so much information that I like, and it's with me when I start writing, but it just kind of comes out.

"What makes a Dolls song doesn't have as much to do with what we started out doing," said Mr. Johansen, "which was making up songs around what we could play. So there was even less criteria then! But that's not something you can really intellectualize. We never set out to make punk rock. We didn't have that word back then, even. That U.K. deal, burn it down, that was their thing. And that punk was the most limited genre. If I was gonna put a name on it, the farthest I would go would be pop music; I just wish it was popular! But 'punk,' I don't like."

Though it has by far been his most fruitful collaboration, working with Mr. Sylvain, a friend for several decades, has its downsides, too, as when he recently let slip a tour plan for the summer meant to be kept secret. "Yeah, Sylvain Assange--Syl let it slip that we were touring with Mötley Crüe this summer, and it went viral, so here we are."

Ms. Hennessey's daughter's
band, Make Out, is opening for the Dolls at the Bowery shows. "I had nothing to do with it!" she claimed.

Both Mr. Johansen, 61, and Ms. Hennessey, 48, were looking strikingly thin and well manicured. She was wearing a big gauzy scarf over a fuzzy black vest, her pale eyeliner sparkling under her jet-black hair. Behind his slightly tinted tortoise-shell glasses, Mr. Johansen was always trying to lock eyes while speaking.

Just before eating, Mr. Johansen and Ms. Hennessey popped pills, presumably to aid in digestion.

"Is it al dente enough?" Ms. Hennessey asks about The Observer's pasta. Then came the recommendations of great pasta joints on Staten Island, Mr. Johansen's native borough, where he recently returned to live (part time) for the first time since he was 17. (He is helping to care for an aging aunt.)

Aside from the weekly show he hosts on Sirius Satellite Radio, Mr. Johansen is defiantly analog in his tastes.

"I used to love to go into Tower Records up on the West Side; there was a guy there named Sasha, and I really liked a lot of the records he liked, and then that leads to exploring other things about that artist and all. I miss it. I don't lament it, but it was good."

He trailed off, as he would throughout dinner, exploding excitedly in answering a question only to pull back, reconsider, drift away. The tendency became more pronounced when he was asked about his relationship with New York.

"New York's a good place to keep your stuff!" he said. "I couldn't even begin to describe to you what this city means to me." He started to chuckle. "I grew up here and I was never like, 'Oh, wow, the big city!' But then you go somewhere else, and you're like, 'Ewww.'"

editorial@observer.com

Yo La Tengo is a New York (by way of Hoboken) institution, celebrating its 25th year of making music. The reasons the band has outlasted many of its indie peers are many, but most have to do with a careful balance of novelty and consistency.

Never cohering to a scene or sound has been advantageous for Yo La Tengo, though the trio's hallmarks—hushed brokenhearted pop and elegiac swells of feedbacky reckoning—appear on nearly every album; kind reminders that it’s still Yo La Tengo, shifting while staying in the same place. A nice trick. 1993’s Painful and 1997’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One are the epochal albums. But the last two, 2003’s Summer Sun and 2006’s I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, have proven that, like fellow survivors Sonic Youth, the band is making some of the most vital, assured and arresting music of its career.

Earlier this month the band released its sixteenth album, the cheekily-titled, Popular Songs. It’s cheeky because while the band sees consistent sales that would be the envy of most indie rock outfits (75,000 to 125,000 for the last few records), its popularity is sculpted not from overwrought posturing, obsessive audio tinkering or playing to any particular audience, but from simply making the records the band wants to hear.

“As simplistic as it sounds, we just kept working for ourselves and writing songs to please ourselves and each other,” James McNew, Yo La Tengo's bassist, told The Observer. “Making records that we thought were good. We didn’t set out to recruit new fans, but that’s worked for us. We just keep doing what feels right.”

And what the band wants to hear has been all over the place, a wide array of sounds, usually tending back toward swirling, feedbacky laments, with stops along the way for everything from funk meltdowns to sugary pop ditties. The new album is a microcosm of the pattern. It opens with a trio of pop tunes taking the band down numerous stylistic paths, from the orchestral-tinged, soundtrack-ready opener to sunny psych freakouts and on to pulsing, keyboard-drone-driven rumblers. The album gets on more familiar poppy ground through the noisy drive of “Nothing to Hide,” and on through the neat and cute tunes, “When It’s Dark” and “I’m On My Way.” Later, things take a funkier turn, the band getting loose on some organ-driven soul numbers with “Periodically Double or Triple” and “If It’s True.” Then another trio strikes both familiar and unexpected chords; three longer pieces, around ten minutes apiece; jams that evolve dreamlike and give the band space to communicate as slowly, softly, fiercely, or noisily as it wants.

“There’s very little that we think of big-picture-wise while we’re making a record,” said Mr. McNew. “Rarely do we think beyond what we’re doing at the moment. I’m sure [the anniversary has] kinda been in our heads this year, a little. But still, we're not really focusing on celebrating ourselves too much. But it was kind of accidental, almost as if we made a concept record completely in reverse. If you put all those things together you can put together some really strong messages, but we didn’t have any of that in mind.”

And there you have Yo La Tengo. All over the place, yet strangely, comfortingly familiar all the while. It could come from singer/guitarist Ira Kaplan’s onetime métier—music journalist. But more likely it comes from a very genuine collective mania about music. Mr. Kaplan, his wife Georgia Hubley (she plays drums and sings), and Mr. McNew (he sings too, very sweetly, sometimes) share a collective interest to the point of preoccupation with music, television, baseball and culture. It rarely bleeds through in the band’s lyrics, which tend to range from foreboding to melancholic, but always stick to rough narratives of love, loss and longing.

The cultural obsessions come through in the work Yo La Tengo does in between proper albums, keeping themselves exceedingly busy. This year, in addition to Popular Songs, the band released an album under the name Condo Fucks, playing covers in the guise of a mythical more-indie-than-thou band; wrote and performed the soundtrack to film Adventureland; contributed songs to a clutch of compilations; and played a spate of all-acoustic concerts known as the "The Freewheeling Yo La Tengo Tour." They frequently perform cover songs on Jersey City's 91.1 WFMU, and have a long-running charity Hannukah residency at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. They recorded a version of the Simpsons’ theme song and played on Gilmore Girls. Before Adventureland, they scored other films, including Junebug and Old Joy. Yet Mr. McNew is quick to fend off the idea that the band may be cashing in.

“It’s definitely artistically motivated," he said. "Adventureland was the first movie we actually got paid for. We did the other ones just because we wanted to do them, and it’s something we’ve always wanted to try, so we were kind of in it to be in it. Junebug was the first movie score that we had even tried to do, and that was in 2003. And we’d been together for 15 years and had discovered a brand new way to work together, and create together. And I think it created this new feeling of self-sufficiency. And we were doing it all ourselves, recording all of those scores in our practice space, just the three of us. It’s been a really positive development.”

While the band’s adherence to its own whimsy has played a large part in its success, it is by no means reclusive when it comes to press and marketing. “When I read about people who have to be on phone interviews from 6 in the morning until 10 o’clock at night, talking to Morning Zoo radio DJs on the air, well, that sounds like a nightmare. So I try to take it all in perspective,” said Mr.McNew. And the band has found ways of connecting with fans without offering endless tour diaries and news streams. “We’re not so into recounting the minutiae of our daily adventures to people," he said. "Talking about anything other than ourselves in our own way is our way of releasing information about who we are and what we’re doing, whether that’s writing about stupid TV shows or anything we happen to come up with. Too much information can be a bummer. It can be more fun when you have to use your imagination with someone. We’ve never made a record with a lyric sheet, and never gone into a real heavy duty press release telling you what we were all going through while we made this record. A), I hate that, and B), it’s kind of like giving instructions to people on how to listen to your record. It’s better to leave it open and people can put their own feelings and ideas into it, and I think that’s more satisfying.”

Yet if Yo La Tengo remains somewhat aloof in its public face, the band has always been diligent in its devotion to keeping in personal contact with fans. Back in what Mr. McNew called “the analog days,” they were attentive in written correspondence with fans, and today they spend plenty of time answering fan emails. Mr. McNew even runs the band's newfangled Twitter feed, which matches cute observations with links to band performances and news items. “I kinda do enjoy it, particularly the challenge of the limitations,” he said.

Artistic breadth has also been a calling card of the band. They’ve worked with tons of their peers and heroes, from Ray Davies to Jad Fair to Ornette Coleman. They had a minor hit with a kid-chorus-accented cover of Sun Ra’s herky-funky "Nuclear War." They’ve had fine artists design their album covers, from Gregory Crewdson to Gary Panter to their latest cover, courtesy of artist Dario Robleto. The smashed cassette tape on the cover of Popular Songs is constructed from, among other things, pulverized bones and trinitite, a glass produced during the first atomic test explosion.

“We all felt a really strong connection with Robleto’s work,” said Mr. McNew. “We gingerly approached him and he wrote us back right away and he was a fan already and blew our minds, collectively. It couldn’t have been any more perfect and any more exciting. These are people who we love and really respect, and cherish their work, and the other side of that is that maybe you will too. It’s not so much, ‘Learn about this, dummy!’ It’s more like, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if Gary Panter would do our album cover, or Gregory Crewdson would let us use these photos?’ The answer, it turns out, has been an emphatic, Yes!”

The band’s upcoming show at Roseland Ballroom on Friday, Sept. 25, will be its only New York area appearance in close to a year of planned shows. (The Maxwell’s Hanukkah shows are off this year). As a special gift for hometown fans, the band has some treats on offer: the Black Lips are opening, there will be a light show by Joshua White & Gary Panter, Susquehanna Industrial Tool & Die Co. will be playing in the lobby, and Daily Show correspondent John Oliver will emcee the night. Of course, serious touring is a proven moneymaker, but Mr. McNew also looks forward to the in-between times to come, where the band finds itself anew. “When touring starts to slow down and time opens up, interesting opportunities kind of pop up in those times, and we always try to do them and take on anything that seems interesting," he said. "I remember reading how David Sedaris would write a book, and then finish it, and then just go get a job somewhere doing something and that’s how he would learn about people and get ideas, working in a department store or whatever. I always thought that was really funny, but it also makes perfect sense. The things you’re doing when you’re not doing your main job can be very informative and can kind of awaken different parts of your brain that you weren’t using.”

But Dinosaur Jr. has pulled off something very different: They’ve picked up their sound just as it was when they imploded years ago, just as if time had stood still.

The band is now four years, two full-length albums and scores of live shows into its own sequel, and sounds as though no time had elapsed since the first act at all. More impressive, the music sounds as relevant today as it did in the 1990s, when the band was at the height of its popularity.

“I think time has shown that for whatever reason we are some people who were kind of blessed with having unique musical chemistry,” said bassist Lou Barlow in an interview with The Observer, “I think the thing about us is that we have a very unique sound when we play together, and you can’t really replicate it, obviously, if [lead singer–guitarist J. Mascis] is not there but also if I’m not there and if [drummer Emmett Murphy, a.k.a. Murph]’s not there. It just doesn’t happen. There could be three kids right now playing in a basement somewhere that, for some reason, some crazy sound happens, and it only happens with those kids, and the thing is, that kind of thing is pretty rare. And when it happens, people want to hear it, people want you to revisit it.”

The band plays the season finale of the Central Park Summerstage program this coming Sunday (Saviours and the Walkmen open up). The venue has been good to them: It was the show, during their first reunion tour, that solidified their confidence in their fan base, and the music press’ confidence in the reconstituted Dinosaur.

“I remember a lot of people being really, really happy and smiling,” Mr. Barlow recalled. “The reunion was still really fresh, there were people who hadn’t seen us together again, so it was sort of like the first reunion in a way, it was just so positive. It was crazy; for how negative it had been in my last shows with the band, to see this outpouring of goodwill felt so great. People just seemed really happy.”

The band started when high-school buddies Messrs. Barlow and Mascis formed Deep Wound, a fast, cheap, hard-core band. It eventually melded into Dinosaur around 1984 (the Jr. was added once the band hit it mildly big and whoever was in the original Dinosaur got a lawyer). Soon came three albums: Dinosaur (1985), You’re Living All Over Me (1987) and Bug (1988).

More Dinosaur albums followed, and they had the backing of Sire Records. But Mr. Barlow was out of the band after Bug, and the band members were not shy about their personal disputes, talking about each other in interviews and in lyrics. Mr. Mascis’ Dinosaur recorded four albums and scored some hits, and Mr. Barlow achieved his own kind of success with the milder, sometimes experimental Sebadoh (and Sentridoh, and Folk Implosion).

In 1997, Mr. Mascis formally retired the Dinosaur Jr. brand, and went out on his own.

Eight years later, listeners were still discovering those first three great Dinosaur albums, and in enough numbers that the record label Merge decided to reissue all three of them. Of course, a tour would be necessary to support the reissue, and so Messrs. Mascis, Barlow and Murphy found themselves, however reluctantly, on the road again.

In 2007 they released the album Beyond, an excellent outing and, to many listeners, the fourth “real” Dinosaur album. Mr. Barlow is pretty clear that this is not a band of brothers, but a union of musicians who have a good thing going.

“For the band it was just letting go of stuff, of personal issues and making the music the most important thing,” Mr. Barlow told The Observer. “I started playing and it was like, ‘Wow, it’s here. Here’s that sound again.’”

Farm, released in June on the Jagjaguwar label, features tunes both epic and sensitive.

There’s still plenty of mopey defeatism lyrically, another stripe of what made the band so great, as on “Over It”: “Can I make it here?/ Get over it/ I’ve been feeling weird/ Get over it.”

“I’ve done studio things with a lot of experimentation, and you spend a lot of time and treat things, and throw them away,” Mr. Barlow said. “With Dinosaur, it’s far more of a workmanlike attitude. It’s not the funnest thing, but generating new songs, that is great.”

editorial@observer.com

“We felt there were a lot of things we didn’t like about last year,” he told The New York Observer in an interview this week. “I walked around as a fan and stood in those lines, and when you go stand in that line, you get mad, and even if it’s me. I don’t want to wait. Who would want to have to go through that?”

Last year, he had 27,000 people “going through that” on Friday, 30,000 on the headlining day, Saturday, and 22,000 on Sunday. From the noise coming off the Internet, it might have been a million.

Last year, the fest’s debut featured two nights headlined by Radiohead and many other impressive bands, but also endless lines for food, pain-in-the-ass ferry and parking problems and what lots of people thought were draconian restrictions on beer drinkers (small, prisonlike drinking pen, five-beer maximum). “All Points Worst” was the festival’s most prominent epitaph on the Web.

Some sample threads on the festival’s official message board in the year since have read like a summer-camp burn-book: “Sneaking In,” “The Stages Should Face The Opposite Direction,”

“How dumb is this ‘green’ deal?” “All Points West Sux” and, of course, “Paul Tollett is a D-bag.”

Mr. Tollett might have been the main candidate to get it right: He’s the mastermind behind California’s Coachella Festival, after all. He oversees Goldenvoice, which produces some 300 shows a year, and along with AEG Live puts on APW, Coachella, Stagecoach, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and Seattle’s Bumbershoot festival, among others. But with local grumps—that is to say, New Yorkers—he’s found that keeping an ear to the message boards is all-important.

“We read the message boards and the emails, and people complain or give advice,” he said. “Some of it is very negative. You can do everything right and there’s still 12 people for whom it’s the worst thing they’ve ever seen, but you watch and you can see what makes sense. Enough people have a problem and it might be a real problem.”

Mr. Tollett expects similar attendance numbers this year, but he says he’s ready for them.

“The first year of Coachella, we didn’t have any lines, but that’s only because we didn’t sell any tickets!”

In place of last year’s third stage (which produced more noise interference and confusing schedules) is a tent where comedians (among them Tim & Eric, Janeane Garofalo and Eugene Mirman), DJs, electronic acts and smaller bands will perform. The Renegade Craft Fair is also along for the ride.

The pain-in-the-ass trip should be relieved somewhat by public transit discounts. But the biggest test will be at the beer garden, which is going to be larger, with shorter waits, a shady location and views of the stages.

Of course, this is New York, and major bands come through all the time. It’s the specific location—“within sight of the Statue of Liberty and ground zero”—that provides its greatest attraction and also its greatest drawbacks: drinking restrictions on federal property, the security considerations that go along with holding the event at a prominent national site. Overnight camping? Forget it.

So you’ve got to put together one hell of a lineup.

Headliners this year include Tool, Coldplay and Jay-Z (a last-minute replacement for the Beastie Boys), and other performers include Echo & the Bunnymen, My Bloody Valentine, MSTRKRFT, the Black Keys, Fleet Foxes, Neko Case and more than 65 other artists.

What’s new this time around is a bit of pandering to New Yorkers, trying to brand the fest with local flavor peppered into each day, “with the Beastie Boys—and now Jay-Z is in there—and

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Vampire Weekend, MGMT and all those bands. It’s very friendly to the area,” Mr. Tollett said.

The Economics of Eclecticism

But there are other reasons the list swerves from contemporary hip-hop to British New Wave and shoegazing acts of the 1980s and 1990s, from jock-fave balladeers like Coldplay to nightclub punkers like Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

For a time, it was hard to get bands to play a festival in the U.S. Mr. Tollett started Coachella in 1999, two years after Lollapalooza had crashed and burned and the same year Woodstock traded the last of its peace-and-love legacy for fire, violence and rape. It wasn’t a great year for festivals, and Coachella lost $800,000.

The following year ran at a loss as well, but somehow Mr. Tollett managed to turn things around, and Coachella has been one of the country’s biggest and best-loved festivals ever since, in part because of attention to lineups as well as lines. As the ’00s progressed, bands started warming again to the idea (and the large payoffs) of playing festivals.

“What’s good about a festival is you can play it off-cycle,” Mr. Tollett said. “Touring and headlining across the country sometimes is difficult if you don’t have product. This way you can pop in, there’s somewhat of a built-in crowd, and you can do your thing, but it’s not as much on your shoulders. You’re playing for a lot of people who would never have paid to see you. That crowd of 50,000 people wouldn’t pay the couple hundred dollars to go see Paul McCartney or Roger Waters at Staples Center or whatever, but while they’re at Coachella, they figure, ‘I’ll listen to a few Beatles songs!’”

And especially in the new music economy—where touring is the only real paying gig—these opportunities are starting to resonate with current popular performers and proven hitmakers who’ve left the recording studio but appeal to a broader age range of nostalgists.

Witness performances by ’80s psychedelic New Wave phenom Echo and the Bunnymen, and ’90s shoegazing pioneers My Bloody Valentine. After all, at these prices, you’d better be able to reel in the 35-to-45-year-olds.

For such bands, doing festival gigs allows them to test new material, create a market for their back catalog and figure out whether there’s another bite at the apple before taking on expensive tours themselves—or cutting an expensive studio album.

Mr. Tollett and his team started out thinking of Coachella as a local festival, but as festivals became more plausible gigs for big-draw performers, fans began traveling from far afield to attend, and Goldenvoice began looking east.

After an affiliation with the ill-fated Field Day Festival in 2003, Mr. Tollett knew it might work.

“I could just see by the sales, the sales were just phenomenal,” he said. “And we got a call from Liberty State Park there was an opening to do something there. There hadn’t been anything there since September 11. And Radiohead had played there before September 11, and it was kind of legendary, so that seemed like a perfect fit.”

Big-Brand Music

Eventually Goldenvoice merged with AEG Live, and now All Points West has its share of corporate sponsors, too, including H&M, PlayStation, Major League Baseball, State Farm, Twix, Toyota and, of course, Anheuser Busch.

In addition to the long lines, pricey bottled water and disorganization of the late ’90s festivals, overbearing corporate sponsorship was a huge turnoff to fans.

The trick? To keep the sponsorships subtle enough not to annoy the fans and still collect from both.

One potential marketing disaster was the eleventh-hour pullout of the Beastie Boys last week (Adam Yauch is taking a break to treat cancer in his parotid gland, a salivary gland in the throat, and the band will miss not only APW, but Lollapalooza and headlining gigs at the Osheaga Fest in Montreal and the Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco).

“I’ve never had a headliner cancel, and that was like, ‘Oh, wow, I guess that could happen,’” said Mr. Tollett. “I didn’t know what to do. Do you just run the show without your headliner? You don’t have to give refunds because it says subject to change, but the thing is, you’re trying to gain the trust of the fans, so we decided this year to just give refunds.”

The idea of using Jay-Z as a replacement came to Mr. Tollett at once: It both fulfilled the New York niche of this year’s festival and another of the promoter’s pet ambitions. Jay-Z has played a number of European festivals, including the U.K.’s O2 Wireless and Glastonbury, and Roskilde in Denmark, but this will be his first performance at a major U.S. fest, and Mr. Tollett wants to put more such acts—headlining in Europe but not here—front and center.

“I would like to see more bands like that who came up through the system. Jay-Z, the Killers, Kings of Leon all opened up festivals in Europe but not here. How come Europe has more faith in our bands than we do?”

And it’s just possible that the European model of the big, hip, yet smoothly run festival you can count on finding in the same place each year—rather than the model set down by Lollapalooza in the 1990s—will take hold in the U.S. as well.

Mr. Tollett certainly hopes so.

“To me, a festival is just like one giant club, where you get to walk around, you don’t have to sit in a seat, you can go meet your friends and hang out with them,” he said. “You’re there and you see the Statue of Liberty and all the buildings and the sky is so incredible at night.”

All Points West takes place this coming Friday through Sunday, from noon to 11:30 p.m., at Liberty State Park, Jersey City; single-day tickets, $89, three-day tickets, $239; apwfestival.com.

If you're Matthew Sweet, he of 90's hits "Girlfriend" and "Sick of Myself," you do all that. And you make pottery that looks like cats.

If you're Susanna Hoffs, she of '80s hitmaking girl group the Bangles, you do all that, go on some national reunion tours, and make sure you're done in time to pick the kids up from school.

Mr. Sweet, 44, and Ms. Hoffs, 50, represent two distinct narratives of musical fame, fortune, decline, and rebirth. The album they made together, "Under The Covers, Vol. 2," is out this week. It's the second installment of gently faithful covers from the duo (the first, focused on sixties hits, came out in 2006. This one looks at the seventies).

The Bangles formed in 1982, and rocketed out of the West Coast's indie psychedelic-pop Paisley Underground scene, from early hits "Manic Monday" and "Walk Like an Egyptian" to the latter days of "Eternal Flame." By 1990 the band had split, but have since managed to turn a reunion tour into a lucrative rebirth, and are currently working on a new album, and plan to keep touring intermittently. In the interim, Ms. Hoffs put out two modest solo albums.

Covers are somewhat in Ms. Hoffs’ blood, dating back to the Paisley Underground cover record "Rainy Day."

"I learned how to sing just by copying records that I loved," Ms. Hoffs told the Observer. "The Bangles were able to figure out who we were by the covers that we did. It was an important step in our evolution to learn songs and figure out how they work and play them."

Although Mr. Sweet never cared much for covers (though he did do a great version of the Scooby Doo theme for the "Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits" compilation), "Rainy Day" was an inspiration to him.

Born in Nebraska, Mr. Sweet started out as a peripheral figure in the Athens, Ga. music scene. He collaborated with Michael Stipe. But it was the major label triumvirate of 1991's "Girlfriend," 1993's "Altered Beast," and 1995's "100% Fun" that Mr. Sweet became one of the landmark alternative acts of the era. The Thorns, his early 00's band with Shawn Mullins and Pete Droge, was his last experience on a major label.

Mr. Sweet and Ms. Hoffs started hanging out around 2003 when they were both asked to be in Ming Tea, the band in the Austin Powers movies (which Ms. Hoffs' husband directed). Shortly after they were working together on a benefit show.

"Matthew mentioned that the first time he ever heard me was in high school on that 'Rainy Day' record and my version of 'I'll Keep it with Mine,'" Ms. Hoffs said. "He said he really wanted to produce a record for me. We got interest from Shout! Factory and we were brainstorming and they said 'what about doing some covers.' Once we started working it became a sort of addiction."

Covers albums for pop artists seem like a kind of retro idea (The Whirlygigs Sing The Beatles!), but particularly for artists attempting to find new audiences or to jump-start a stalled career (Rod Stewart), the covers album is pure platinum, in some cases literally.

Mr. Sweet and Ms. Hoffs weren't quite likely to get there.

"I know I should be worried," Mr. Sweet said. "Like how are we gonna pay for our house next year, but I dunno. The cool thing about doing the records that Sue and I do is that everything is kind of more casual."

The two take on a persona as a duo for the purposes of the album: Sid and Susie, the names they were given by comedian Mike Meyers during the Ming Tea sessions. It creates a bit of distance between their own music and their work together as fanboy cover artists.

"We're such fans that we made the covers by going and listening to these records," Mr. Sweet said. "They're by the seat of their pants, and there's something really appealing to that, they captured a moment."

Ms. Hoffs connected to the songs with the help of her two sons.

"I had a CD with all the original versions of the songs in the car, songs I've listened to so many times in my life, but my kids, by extension, are learning a lot," she said. "So I'd be playing them these songs and I'd be asking them like, 'isn't this Yes song so incredibly ambitious?'"

The song choice communicates a kind of smart yet broad approach to the history of pop music. They're mostly hits, or were when they came out, with a few curveballs ("Willin" by Little Feat, a lesser-known Todd Rundgren tune). Cute liner notes spin yarns like "Bob Weir once invited our girl Susie to 'come on honey come along with me!'" ("Sugar Magnolia").

Guests on the album include Dhani Harrison playing on his father George's "Beware of Darkness," Steve Howe of Yes contributing a guitar part for the cover of "I've Seen All Good People: Your Move/All Good People," and Fleetwood Mac's Lindsay Buckingham adding a blazing guitar solo to "Second-Hand News," one that rocked so hard the duo extended the song to accommodate it.

Sometimes the process of finding these old pop geniuses was charmingly nonprofessional.

"We decided we would cover Yes," said Mr. Sweet. "We built up the track but thought the lead of Steve Howe was so great, so I went online and found the Steve Howe Appreciation Society and wrote the webmaster and she hooked us up with Steve, and he recorded his parts in England and Emailed them to us."

Elsewhere the album covers a breezy "Maggie May" and a sneering-yet-tender "All The Young Dudes."

The duo recorded close to 40 tracks in all, stretching into harder rock and even punk and disco.

"The thing we realized about the 70's is how incredibly diverse the era was, from sensitive singer songwriter stuff to Zeppelin and the Stones and punk rock," said Ms. Hoffs. "So we did a lot of songs. We did a version of "Jive Talkin'," and a song by the Ramones, and a Stones song. That's why it took a little bit of time to finish the album."

This week the duo descends on L.A.'s Grammy Museum for an intimate acoustic show and question and answer session, and from there will travel to several similar gigs nationwide.

They're both apprehensive about taking the show on the road, despite their name recognition and, at least in Ms. Hoffs' case, great success touring. "The problem is unless you're recently a super famous group or really had a big following in the day, it's still difficult to tour," Mr. Sweet said. "I can go out and have really good crowds in New York and Chicago and the bigger cities, and some second-tier cities too, but it's hard to make enough money to make money."

But they both would love to get on the road and connect with their fans.

"Its hard for me to put my finger on the demographic," Ms. Hoffs said. "All I know is that I've never made a record where the people who love it love it so much, saying 'it was in my car all summer, it was my soundtrack.' That's really flattering to me."

"I guess there's just so much out there that it's sort of overwhelming," Mr. Sweet said. "That's why playing for people is so appealing, and connecting with people in a small way and not a World Wide Web way."

Not that either believes the rise of the Internet and the decline of the major-label system has messed up their lives.

"I have other things I've gotten into," said Mr. Sweet. "I've learned to make pottery. I've gotten good enough at it, and my fans have gotten into it. I had an article in Cat Fancy that talked about my cats but also talked about cat pottery that I made, so I think of my house as a pottery and recording studio. I love that about the Internet, because you can connect to people without having to rely on some huge department. I have a studio in my house that's just as good for all intents and purposes as studios I would have used back in the 90s. So at least we can keep making music and not be spending all that money."

At the moment Mr. Sweet is helping Ms. Hoffs record some original songs as well as some Bangles tunes, and both look forward to making Volume 3 of Under the Covers. Mr. Sweet is philosophical about his time with the majors and his newfound freedom and its complement—self-reliance.

"What's sad to see gone is the way labels would develop bands, all the David Geffen people, like James Taylor, allowed to make records before they made big records. Working with the Thorns with Columbia was a sort of last gasp," he said. "We sold like 175,000 records, and that now would be like No. 1 most weeks, and they wouldn't agree to keep us because we wanted to produce ourselves because we wanted to make some money. Why wouldn't they just pay us what it cost to fly us out to do one radio show? They should have spent less and stuck with people."

"Under The Covers Vol. 2" (Shout! Factory) is out this week; Hoffs and Sweet come to the City Winery for an acoustic show on Sept. 11, 2009.

A year later, they performed the very first concert ever held at Shea Stadium.

This week, Paul McCartney is back to christen that arena’s replacement, Citi Field. And while in town, he’ll be heading to the Ed Sullivan Theater July 14 to play for that theater’s new inhabitant, David Letterman.

The concerts and Late Show appearance kick off Mr. McCartney’s latest U.S. tour, which will take him across the country.

It’s somehow fitting that, both really and virtually, Mr. McCartney is returning to these epochal venues.

At times, Mr. McCartney’s most recent reinventions have, if anything, strained for the trappings of 21st-century relevance and ended up being pure nostalgia. At the end of the summer, both Citi Field and the Ed Sullivan will be featured in the Beatles version of the video game “Rock Band,” slated for a Sept. 9 release. The game comes packed with 45 Beatles songs to play (or to approximate playing) in your living room—like 21st-century sheet music!

But at Citi Field and the Ed Sullivan Theater this week, it’s the music that will be the center of attention. And that is good for Mr. McCartney, because nowadays, and for the first time in a long time, he is exhibiting some part of the ambition that made the Beatles, and an earlier Mr. McCartney, not just world-famous, rich, the center of the recording-industry universe, but actually great.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to speak of a man like Paul McCartney as having been unambitious. But given his early legendary status, it was easy to think that the fans’ connection to Mr. McCartney made success too easy for him.

How do you continue a career that seemingly can’t go wrong, and infuse it with the energy that accompanied that first American tour?

In many ways, this recent shift is the result of years spent in the dead center of the music industry, watching its decline. It’s also proof that Mr. McCartney the studio tinkerer, responsible for backward guitar lines and orchestral cacophonies in the Beatles days, hasn’t lost his curiosity.

It’s possible that no one was as entrenched or even as responsible for what happened to the music industry since 1970 as Paul McCartney (and by extension, the Beatles). He was signed to EMI for decades and made the label very rich (and he didn’t do so bad for himself). Yet by 2007, McCartney was convinced the industry had reached the end of its usefulness. He called EMI “boring.” He walked.

Mr. McCartney’s relationship to Big Music has often been contentious, but never has it propelled him so far outside its own conventional commercial wisdom as it has now.

Soon after the game’s release, downloadable versions of Beatles albums, starting with Abbey Road, will finally be made available. (The Beatles haven’t exactly been on the edge of new technologies; it took years before their catalog was first available on CD, too.) In a nice touch, a download of “All You Need Is Love” will be available exclusively to Xbox 360 users and proceeds will go to Doctors Without Borders.

One return that isn’t in the cards for Sir Paul is those Beatles songs Michael Jackson owned before his death. In the past weeks, rumors swirled that he had willed the songs back to Mr. McCartney (and Ringo, one presumes), but this turned out to be untrue. On his Web site, Mr. McCartney explained that it was fine, because the alleged will was “something I didn’t believe for a second.” He also insisted that the famed rift between the two onetime collaborators (“The Girl Is Mine,” “Say Say Say”) was overplayed by the media: “In fact, though Michael and I drifted apart over the years, we never really fell out, and I have fond memories of our time together.” He did however call Michael a “boy man,” which may be accurate, as well as accurately creepy.

One former associate whose passing likely did not elicit fond memories for Mr. McCartney was Allen Klein, who died July 4. The noted cutthroat manager who once quipped “Don’t talk to me about ethics” tried to wrest the Beatles catalog just as the band was splitting up (he’d conned his way into many valuable Rolling Stones rights years before), but thanks in part to Mr. McCartney’s vocal dissent, he never got a chance.

Mr. McCartney learned from these un-square dealers. He’s been working to extricate himself from middlemen for the past two years. He’s in a video game. He’s circumventing the major-label system that once revolved around him. He was quoted in the press saying he’d like to work with MGMT (they’re opening a few dates on this tour). Who is this old hipster?

He became the first artist on the Starbucks–Concord Music Group’s Hear Music Record Co. Memory Almost Full was well received, among critics but especially by the public, and sold more than a million copies in the U.S.—his highest-selling stateside release in 25 years. The 2007 album was solid though comfortable, not much of a musical surprise. Mr. McCartney also made a deal to sell the album through iTunes, and even allowed a song to be used in a commercial for the online music giant.

Hear Music seemed like a sure thing. But by 2008, Starbucks’ model wasn’t looking so rosy anymore. Returns diminished through Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon and James Taylor and onto, uh, Cat Power (apparently just being in a Starbucks isn’t enough to make people buy music by someone other than someone who was in the Beatles). As Starbucks started slashing prices and closing hundreds of branches, Hear Music got shunted over entirely to Concord Music, and Starbucks focused on its partnership with iTunes rather than cultivating a label.

But set adrift, Mr. McCartney did not return to the majors. In fact the decline of Hear Music may have been even more liberating for him. His next album was self-released in late 2008 by MPL, an imprint of his own London-based publishing company, and distributed through indie labels (ATO, One Little Indian) as well as on his own Web site. It was also released under the name Fireman, not as Paul McCartney—the return to that moniker for the first time in a decade. (He’s used it twice before in non-vocal electronic collaborations with producer (and ex–Killing Joke bassist) Martin “Youth” Glover, in 1993 and 1998).

All the Fireman albums have been expressly about pushing Paul McCartney to places where he sounds very un-McCartney. In the past, that’s meant rather drippy electronica. This time it meant a rather joyous (and noisy!) psychedelic pop album titled Electric Arguments, in which there’s no piano balladeering and even less anthemized “Hey Jude”–like formula-ism. The album ranges from the heavy kerrang of the opener (“Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight”) to the plaintive and lo-fi follow-up (“Two Magpies”), reminiscent of the hushed urgency of his early solo albums, and on through string sections and rousing marching-band fervor and even a bit of hymn singing (“Is This Love?”).

The collaborative duo worked swiftly, crafting 13 tracks in as many days, yet the results feel vital rather than slapdash. There are thunderous, Zeppelin-like rockers and Paul duetting with his own falsetto and Paul’s voice at a shout, nearly subsumed in more than a few reverb storms of epic proportions. He’s done nothing like this in many years. It’s proof that McCartney’s legendary experimental streak is still around and can be folded into his more prosaic pop songwriting.

A statement released about the album bragged that it was “made with no record company restraints or a set release date to work to” and “with complete artistic and creative freedom.”

It shows, and it will be interesting to see how much Macca makes of his newfound freedom.

editorial@observer.com

They Might Be Giants have something of a split personality these days. That TMBG makes music that kids like is really no surprise to anyone who has heard their music from before they started doing music that was explicitly for children. Like Jonathan Richman or Jad Fair, they make the kind of faux-naïve, smart pop-rock peppered with absurdity and artsy pranksterism that parents have for some time now been able to play with the kids in the room. After all terms like “nerd-rock ” have been summoned to describe the sound, often not even just to describe songs that are overtly if jokingly educational like “James K. Polk,” “Why Does the Sun Shine? (The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas),” or, of course, their version of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople). That a band would make stuff like this for adults is only testament to how easy it always should have been for the band to make adult music for kids.

Of course for the same reason, critics have long dismissed the act as a good-natured goof, and therefore a dangerous misapplication of real musical talent to pure gimmickry and quirkiness. Ignoring that kind of snobbery about the purpose of songwriting has given the band a devoted core following, and has positioned the band well to market itself in the new, niche-driven, direct-from-manufacturer-to-listener, Internet era of popular music.

In 2002, when the two Johns (Flansburgh and Linnell), the founders and figureheads, and the rest of the band decided to put out an album of kid-oriented songs, it was a bit of a lark, a one-off, a confection to add to the Whitman's sampler of the band's output. (Mr. Linnell had done the thing where you cover each of the 50 states when Sufjan Stevens was barely a gleam in the hipster eye.)

“We approached it like a Holiday album,” Mr. Flansburgh said in an interview with The Observer. “That time was kind of a transitional moment for us. We were working on a couple of television shows doing incidental music, and that outside experience had loosened us up a bit.”

Those television shows, “The Daily Show” and “Malcolm in the Middle,” would be hits. At the same time, the band was suddenly getting the star treatment with a retrospective in the form of a box set released by Rhino, and a documentary titled “Gigantic” in which the band were the stars.

“Doing something entirely outside our regular album output without being fully misunderstood suddenly seemed like an option available to us,” he said. “We never dreamed the kids' stuff would get the kind of popular response it got.”

Since then they’ve released two more kids albums, one of which netted them a Grammy this year. In just the past year they composed music for the movie “Coraline,” toured behind their latest adult record, “The Else,” recorded podcasts, blogged, and on and on.

TMBG started as just the two Johns: a guitar, an accordion, and a tape recorder (for loops and drum machine tracks) cruising the downtown New York experimental café scene in the early ‘80s. Word of mouth (and talent, of course) got them a wider following, and after their 1986 debut, MTV took notice and helped to catapult them into homes across the country. They became mainstays of the influential Sunday night college and alternative music show “120 Minutes,” got a major label deal, and did a brisk touring business, particularly when they fleshed out their sound with a full live band.

Meanwhile their adorable Dial-a-Song service, advertised at first cryptically in the Village Voice classifieds, allowed listeners to call in and hear songs, song fragments, and other ephemera on a special answering machine, a charming way to connect directly with fans, perhaps especially charming, in retrospect, for its multilayered obsolescence from today's point of view. Dial-a-Song was a sort of analog version of a Web site (on a souped-up answering machine), and listeners got a totally intimate experience with the band from a remote vantage.

By the 90s, with alternative culture seeping into the mainstream and the trends moving to louder, messier, longer-haired and bearing significantly less irreverence for the professional “standards” of contemporary pop, the band’s fortune was changing. Dropped from Elektra, they decided to take a stab at this whole Web thing and, in 1999, partnered with eMusic for the first Internet-only album release.

“From the moment I heard about the Web I was trying to figure out how we could get audio going there,” Mr. Flansburgh told The Observer. “But it wasn't until MP3s that it really worked.”

“Long Tall Weekend” ended up becoming the most downloaded-for-pay album to that date. The band went on to beef up its Web presence with a blog, podcasts, and plenty of other goodies, while Dial-A-Song got a home online before being essentially merged with the podcast. Not all bands are as freakishly prolific as TMBG, but in giving away so much free music and information, the band was making its way into the future (a future far sunnier than that of Elektra, which was gobbled up by Warner Music Group in 2004 and summarily merged with Atlantic Records and killed; it’s currently being revived).

The band soon realized the value of giving some stuff away and charging for other stuff.

“It’s one big package deal,” Mr. Flansburgh explained. “From the beginning with Dial-A-Song, we found giving stuff away was a good way to set the tone around where we are at as a band, and it is a good creative challenge for us. We could easily be very precious about everything, so building in the free stuff keeps us loose.”

Along with the Web presence, the band began to diversify into a dizzying array of commercial projects, writing and recording jingles and ditties for Dunkin Donuts, Chrysler, and Coca-Cola. And then came the children.

Among the key reasons for the success of “No!” (Rounder) and its successors, “Here Come the ABCs” and “Here Come the 123s” (both on the Disney label) is that TMBG’s kids songs are just TMBG songs pruned of bad words and darker thoughts; there’s less funny-sad and way more just-fun.

Children aren’t buying a whole lot of records without their parents, and these days, most parents of young children remember TMBG not, like Raffi, from their youth, but from their adolescence. Pretty neat. Dan Zanes, whose former band the Del Fuegos was also a hit in the ‘80s college-rock era, has proven the same rule.

The Web presence, the commercial jingles, and the kids stuff are the reason TMBG (and Zanes) didn’t go the way of, say, the Violent Femmes, and the reason they can continue to make albums the way they want when they want.

None of these projects on its own makes a mint. After pointing out that the Prospect Park show suggests a $3 donation, Mr. Flansburgh is frank about the kids' concert experience.

“We haven't been able to do that many kids shows because for the most part they didn't make economic sense,” he said. “We feel compelled to put on the same quality production whether it's for adults or families, and while that's good for the show, it's tough on our budget. We already run the risk of losing money even at regular concert prices, so unfortunately we often can't swing playing kids shows for the more family-friendly ticket prices cash-strapped families tend to require.”

Plus kids are not good audience for a Dead-style touring schedule, what with those amazingly short attention spans.

TMBG’s diversified efforts have actually allowed them to produce less commercial, more purely creative work too, from their “adult” albums to the CD they made in conjunction with McSweeney’s magazine to their most recent kids’ project, “Bed, Bed, Bed,” a cute book and accompanying 4-song CD co-created with cute artist Marcel Dzama. Kimya Dawson of the Moldy Peaches sings the title song—cutely, of course. Then again, just around the corner comes the band’s CD/DVD “Here Comes Science,” their third Disney album. Because freedom ain’t free. It can be fun though.

[They Might Be Giants play as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn festival this Saturday, July 11, 4:00 P.M. at the Prospect Park Bandshell, with readings of Ezra Jack Keats Stories by Claudia Marshall of WFUV.]

Why? Well, Bravo's reality shows excel at presenting contestants with dumb challenges made slightly less dumb by involving some amount of cool (see also the drag queen challenge on the last season of Project Runway). So we have the genial, feel-good Foo Fighters, a band it seems is almost impossible to hate. Some dislike Dave Grohl for having a good time after the suicide of former bandmate Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and especially for being successful, and rock nerds like to point out he wasn't the original drummer anyway, maaan, but those types hate everything. Oh the other reason is that, according to Dave Grohl, the band members are "fans of Top Chef... we watch it a lot!"

Moving on, wait! This dumb challenge has dumb twists! After a preliminary Quickfire challenge that was notable only for its use of double product placement (Top Chef cookbooks and Swanson broth), "the Foos" appeared (via TV screen) to lay out the challenge: Cook for the band and its crew, paying attention to the official show rider for likes and dislikes (likes include such culinary oddities as "bacon"), and deal with the unrelenting crapitude of the fake privated kitchen the show set up to mess with the chefs. The winner gets to see the Foos play their awesome rockin' show, and the losers have to clean up all the dishes (one wonders who cleans up on every other episode).

As a Spoon song played (is that ironic somehow?), Team Sexy Pants and Team Cougar (yes, in reference to the team's hot older woman: she's 41) faced off to see who would make something totally crummy. The guy making s'mores kept complaining about how tough this challenge was. I wonder if his s'mores turned out bad? The Foos showed up, and someone noted they "look like rock stars," which must have made the band sigh in relief, though another contestant called Tom "Tom-bear-hottie-icon-Colicchio," which is arguably greater praise.

As the band ate and made comments, we learned (again) that Dave Grohl loves bacon, and is also (sorry) quite a ham. His goofy sidekick Taylor Hawkins shared such crits as "I just don't like figs and stuff in my stuffing" and "I don't like pumpkin foam" and "I don't usually even order dessert," while Grohl ruled the night with the simple summation "no more BARFAITS!" Meanwhile the guy who used to be in Sunny Day Real Estate made more serious comments and loved the vegan stuffing (typical!), while Padma put on a kind of devil-may-care burnout act clearly in an attempt to look cool for the band.

The big drama last week was when Padma spit up some overly sweet bit of glop, and this week spit made another cameo, first when Padma made a face a lot like the spit up face, but then managed to not spit, and then when Grohl noted that the vanilla cream on his s'more looked a lot like spit. Next week? more spitting in preview!

Anyway, Team Cougar barfait-ed and spat their way to cleanup duty, and s'mores dude (Richard) packed his knives and went, in tears. Sad, especially when he mentioned he'd tried out three times to be on the show. The Foos won the dumb cel phone poll asking who viewers dumb enough to vote in a Top Chef poll would most want to cook them Thanksgiving dinner. Duh, those guys are famous. In other news, the band recently announced it was taking a long break from touring. Related?

Instead of the lean approach, Day & Age bundles the disparate elements the band has toyed with to date, piggybacking earnest rootsiness right on top of glitzy dance-pop. The weird thing is, in the album's best moments, it works. If anything, the new material displays a band that knows it's a big deal and can summon tuneful bravado in a snap.

So here, finally, slick populism feels more like confidence than a compilation of stolen postures. That doesn't make the Killers any less overblown or overdramatic, and certainly doesn't make Brandon Flowers' trite lyricism any less disposable (the alien abduction narrative "Spaceman" vacillates between outright cliché and wha? sentiments like "They say the Nile used to run from East to West"), but there's a distinct shift in how the songs hit, right from the start.

The album opens with a thrilling trio, where the Killers put forth their very best hooks, riffs, and atmospherics, along with plenty of existential angst, especially on the winning "Human" which asks, as a kind of overarching question for the dance-pop heavy album, "Are we human / Or are we dancer?" It could be a query about the band's worth.

Is the band a manufactured dance-rock robot, or is it capable of something more warm-blooded and stirring?

The warbly hum that starts or ends each of these first songs, the warm throb of OMD, the Human League, and of course Joy Division, would seem to suggest the rise of the machines. On occasion this blood-in-your-head tone returns throughout the album as a bassline, a keyboard touch, but for every dash of New Order that speaks to taste, there's a tinge of tired mid-American mythos or wonky lounge-otica peeking in, suggesting, to borrow a phrase from dancer/robots Daft Punk, that we are human after all.

Blame the hefty synthpop touchpoints on formidable disco-house producer Stuart Price (aka Thin White Duke, Jacques Lu Cont), who never met a Pet Shop Boys club mix he didn't love. He keeps even the more down in the mouth tracks thumping with ethereal drones, and suffuses nearly everything with epic, synthy string sections.

After the opening salvo comes the worldly midsection. The tepid sax-driven pseudo-Caribbeanismo of "Joy Ride" sounds like Jim Morrison fronting Culture Club. Writing a song about the existential angst presented by a night in Vegas (the band's hometown) simply can't help but feel unutterably shallow, but it's not exactly unfunky. A chugging rhythm and faux-African touches mark "This Is Your Life," while "I Can't Stay" seems to take more cues from the cheeseball lounge culture of the band's native land (to say nothing of the steel drums).

The real turn from pure saccharine dance fodder comes with "A Dustland Fairytale," packed with images of broken-down American dreams, and forced sky-high in echo, orchestral swells, and aimless piano plonking. You can almost see Flowers strutting the stage, waving a ragged flag, pouting his best Bono pout. But that is to say it nearly reaches Red Rocks-ian heights of pathos.

The throwaway of "Neon Tiger" and the failed New Order of "The World We Live In" set up woozy, horn-blasted closer "Goodnight, Travel Well" to be somewhat of a heartening capitulation, and it's here you realize that what the band hasn't sacrificed in sonic kitchen-sink-ness, it has achieved in brevity. The songs may be self-indulgent, but they sure are compact, and this makes the rotten ones from stinking too much and keeps the ripe ones from going rotten.

But back to that early human/dancer conundrum. Day & Age may be a bit of a robot, but a tearful one that asks "what does it feel like to love?" In the end it's more Alphaville's "Forever Young" than Gary Numan's "Are Friends Electric?" Though of course heaven knows a whole lot more proms were soundtracked with the former.

Two nights earlier on the MTV Video Music Awards, the night's loud-mouthed, big-haired Brit emcee, comedian Russell Brand, told one too many jokes at the expense of clean tween stars the Jonas Brothers (and their purity rings), and precious American Idol season six winner Jordin Sparks went off script and shot back: "It's not bad to wear a promise ring because not everybody, guy or girl, wants to be a slut."

Brand backpedaled. "I've gotta say sorry. ... I didn't mean to take it lightly. ... I don't want to piss off teenage fans. ... Well done, everyone." He then added, "It's just, a bit of sex occasionally never hurt anybody."

A bit of sex, occasionally, is the rarest thing on offer in the pop sphere of today. Just a bit is that magic amount where an artist summons something subterranean, gets your heart rate going, makes you blush, puts a thrill into you. It only takes a bit to be sexy.

It's that bit that infused Bowie's "Rebel, Rebel," Gaye's "Sexual Healing," Ross' "Love Hangover," Michael's "Father Figure," D'Angelo's "How Does It Feel," and, until a few nights ago, "Miss You."

Sex is by no means the only element in great pop music, but it has never been marginal. A story is often told that modern-day pop consists of the push, pull and meld of the gospel and blues impulses, or the sacred and the profane, or the angel and the devil on your shoulder. When sex enters that matrix, it's always to some degree about transgression, whether joyfully abandoned or guiltily indulgent, but it's also the merging of the private element of sex with the public sphere of singing and listening. These tensions create the dangerous world of sexiness.

But on the current pop scene, sex is an "issue," its stars prone to making these stultifyingly two-faced high-school civics class presentations on the topic rather than actually sing about it. Neither the goody-two-shoes bubblegummers nor their counterparts, the limit-pushing filth specialists (also regular characters in the high-school menagerie, though their presentations are generally made in the locker room), are nothing new. But their stranglehold on pop has never been stronger.

It wasn't always all this predictable. Nobody expected the Carpenters to make you feel funny inside, nor for 2 Live Crew to be romantic. Madonna, Prince and George Michael took a little bit of sex (or in Prince's case, more than a little) and made desire palpable, and sparked outrage and ecstasy in the process. Janet Jackson embodied a fearsome sexiness, Mariah a kind of naïve tease, and while Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears came on the scene acting the part of bubbleheaded jailbait, they also ultimately played with those identifications, neither giving it all up before the first chorus nor saving it all for the wedding night, and left behind a few genuinely sexy numbers. Yet it was Spears whose split personality may have established the current sorry state of affairs, claiming she was, like, a virgin while her music (and Justin Timberlake) told a different story. Since then, the sex lives (or lack thereof) of young stars has become a media obsession (did anyone ever care whether Tiffany was getting laid?) even if there's nothing particularly sexy in the details. At this point the celebrity sex tape is about as shocking, or arousing, as a blooper reel. Today we have Fergie selling her "lady lumps" (uh, swoon?) and Ms. Sparks selling … well no lumps, that's for sure.

A few years ago, when Justin Timberlake brought "sexy back," many wondered "from where? It's freaking everywhere!" Except that J.T. had the right idea. The term itself is more often employed today as a synonym for edgy or glitzy than as something to do with actual sex. It's a marketing term more than anything felt by listeners. The alchemy of what's sexy has fallen by the wayside, lost in the deluge of numbing porniness (think Pussycat Dolls), glitzy overproduced pap (think Black Eyed Peas), morally superior chastity pop (think Jonas Brothers) or self-obsessive, psychology-rock (everything from Radiohead to Fall Out Boy). For all the women who inhabit rap music, it's never been less sexy, in part because of the rise of crack rap and stripper rap, which leave little room for romance (seeming to forget that other word that goes next to "strip"—"tease"). R&B would be the exception, but for its practitioners, so anxious and baroque (R. Kelly), or overly slick and determined (Usher). Ne-Yo's hit "Miss Independent" offers a paean to women who have good jobs, turning sexiness entirely corporate. Kanye would be a cool boyfriend -- he's got great clothes and the latest electronics -- but he's usually too busy thinking about himself to push the right buttons. The whole concept of "grown and sexy," so integral to a portion of the R&B market, takes mature sexiness and laughs it off as cougarism.

Rock may be the most flaccid genre of all, from Coldplay's simpering introspection to Nickelback's steroidal male hysteria to Arcade Fire's needy art-rock. Emo sure isn't sexy (sex is usually why everyone is so sad!), and nor is any of its introvert progeny. Rihanna, Amy Winehouse, Feist: they come closest, but when was the last time any of them made you feel dangerous, scandalized, thrilled that sex exists?

At the same time, we are living in an era where we barely hiccup at the kind of raunch that would have launched congressional hearings a few decades ago. (Lil Wayne's "Lollipop," for example: "That pussy in my mouth / Had me loss for words") But because of the endless repetition, like "Girls Gone Wild," the result is boring. Making love in the club seems less taboo-shattering than unhygienic. When you reach a place where nothing titillates, where all that swearing ceases to unsettle anyone, maybe it's time to rethink the game. Other realms, like that of Ms. Sparks and the Jonases, are almost entirely sexless. It need hardly be pointed out that songs about mutual respect, abstinence and the like aren't all that sexy, either. (Jermaine Stewart's hit "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off" comes to mind. A fun song, but more of a public service announcement than a recipe for fun sexy times.)

So how come there hasn't been a full-scale war between the opposing camps? You've got stars defending chastity: How long before those stars start throwing bombs at those around them?

More to the point, who was Sparks calling a "slut?"

Katy Perry, who had a big hit this summer with her male fantasy vacuity-fest "I Kissed a Girl," is a pretty good candidate, except she used to be on the other team. The daughter of two pastors, Perry released a Christian album in 2001 under the name Katy Hudson, before a makeover into a kind of cheesecake Kelly Clarkson. Her other big hit is "UR So Gay" (not about gay rights, it turns out). At the awards, where Perry was nominated, she performed her girl-on-girl hit as well as a (kind of) cheeky cover of Madonna's "Like a Virgin." Yet all the awkward, soulless performance really proved was how far removed a singer like Perry is from the bona fide, troublemaking sexiness of her foremamas.

What is lost when music becomes a choice between clean asexual fun, moody asexual neurosis and sensory overload surface thrill is the transformative quality that sexiness brings to the table, the ability to live through culture, to form identity, to relate to the world through more than a lifeless, decorative accessory. That Black Eyed Peas cover felt like a soda commercial, and the VMA spat felt like a fight over the marketability of virtue. Sex is nowhere in sight, perhaps because its over-commodification means nobody knows what it feels like anymore. No wonder they sell CD's at Hot Topic now.