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.

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.]

They’re not wrong: Jackson’s deep well of talent and charisma, his sense of the total pop performance, and his well-chosen cadre of collaborators made him the King of Pop.

But his kingdom had been dismantled around him by the time of his death.

It probably started sometime in the early 1990s, the last moment of Jackson’s real power over record-buying audiences.

After that was Napster and the following tide of file-sharing; corporate consolidation of record labels, radio, and music venues, and the concomitant lack of any oversight over the spending habits and business models of the majors; the disappearance of the local record shop, followed quickly by the disappearance of the chain-megastore record shop. Superstars are simply less super these days, while artists still oddly called “indie” are making more money than their college-rock or alternative ancestors could ever have dreamed, and hogging up too much of the market to leave room for a King. The kingdom of pop is now a capitalist republic.

If you’d pointed your Web browser to NPR.org in the past couple of weeks, you might have found yourself listening to a live stream of Wilco’s seventh studio album, perhaps the band’s best. Out today, it’s called Wilco (The Album) and leads off with the track “Wilco (The Song),” as a bizarre kind of Spaceballs tribute.
If you had taken yourself hence to the band’s Web site, where the album had streamed a few weeks before, you’d have found lots of information about the album, the band, upcoming tours, news, and an iPhone app as the cherry on top.

Also on NPR’s site last week, you might have found yourself listening to an interview with Matchbox Twenty lead singer Rob Thomas, whose sophomore solo release is also out today. Moving thence to his Web site would have linked you to streams of his album on VH1.com and Rhapsody, the music download and listening site, as well as to scores of interviews, photos, and more, and even a new track exclusively available on iTunes for a premium price of $1.29.

These are the results of a revolution in the music business that is long completed. But the notion that the ultimate indie-Americana outfit, the scrappily splendid Wilco, and the certified platinum popster Thomas, best known for his duet with Carlos Santana, the tellingly titled “Smooth,” should share practically identical marketing models is worth noting. Selling oneself in the wired era isn’t some sort of magic formula available only to Radiohead and Trent Reznor. It’s everywhere, as artists adapt faster than the crumbling major labels can. They are saving pop one band at a time, and so the spoils will be divided among those who do the work.

Wilco has never had a Top 40 single, and while they are signed to a subsidiary of a major label, how they got there is a world away from the Olympian stature of Thomas, whose tenure with Matchbox Twenty and solo career has been a mainstream mainline all the way.

In the mid-’90s Reprise signed the fledgling indie Wilco seeking riches from the alternative craze like many of the other majors. By the time of its breakthrough, 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco had grown into a successful touring band (selling out 2,000-seat venues without much trouble and making a good living), but its albums weren’t stellar sellers, and so Reprise had grown tired.

When Yankee Hotel Foxtrot displeased Reprise executives, they released the band and, as though to show no hard feelings, allowed it to keep the album.

The band decided to digitally stream the album on its Web site, in this state of corporate limbo, mainly to shore up interest in an upcoming tour. Streaming an entire record was practically unheard of, and if the band had still been on Reprise, it is unlikely to have been permitted.

Hundreds of thousands of listeners came, far more than the band ever expected. Nonesuch Records picked them up (they’re still signed there), a label which is, coincidentally, a division of Warner Bros., just like Reprise.

Warner Bros. had now paid for the album twice. But it was only because of the band’s own intervention that the album sold twice as many copies as any of its previous efforts on Warner. Giving away the music had worked. It’s a formula that still puts Wilco at the leading edge of the pop music business, honed to sharpness since the band’s first stab in 2002. The band still makes most of its money on the road, and knows that all the streams and the iPhone apps do is to get their songs into the ears of potential ticket-buyers (of course, to record buyers, too, but that hardly matters from a business point of view). Sales going up means concerts sell out, and these days Wilco can sell out venues much larger than 2,000-seaters.

Wilco (The Album) takes the lessons of early mission statements and later experiments and fashions songs that feel like a band based on flux is starting over with the lessons of its wanderings fully in mind. The country-rock classicism of A.M. and Being There, the chamber-populism of Summerteeth, and the crackled brilliance and deep grooves of YHF and A Ghost Is Born and even the frazzled comedowns on Sky Blue Sky are all mapped onto the sound. It’s mainly a grim affair, pinioning between melancholic love—via sweet, syrupy folk rock like the Feist-Tweedy duet “You and I” (“However close we get sometimes/ it's like we never met”)—and all-out murder—“Bull Black Nova” (“Blood on the sofa/ blood in the sink/ blood in the trunk”) a squalling, relentless wash of noise and force owing much to Nels Cline’s fresh, ambitious guitar work. Yet in the end, the album seems resolved, after 11 songs, to a kind of tense optimism. It’s an apt metaphor for the arc of their career.

In addition to his NPR Q&A, Rob Thomas partnered with VH1 and Rhapsody to stream his new album, Cradlesong, for the past two weeks prior to its release. He offered exclusive tracks on Rhapsody, hosted a Twitter “contest,” and presented an “innovative advertising campaign” aimed at hard-core Thomas fans and utilizing anecdotes and trivia from throughout his career to appeal directly to his fan base.

In the press release, Thomas is quoted: “Working with Rhapsody and VH1 has been a unique experience, enabling me to interact with even more of my fans. All of the different aspects of this campaign will allow me to reach an even bigger audience.”

It’s hard to take seriously the notion that a multi-platinum artist (sales of more than 80 million albums) could expect to attract a larger audience by going online. Two of the truisms of the Internet are that an abundance of options oddly narrows the perspective of most potential customers and that even a “multi-platinum artist” utilizes the Web mainly to create a direct connection with existing fans.

It’s not as though Wilco is reaching out to Black Eyed Peas fans, or that Mr. Thomas is trying to recruit the Belle & Sebastian set. Both are simply trying to connect with listeners who are already out there, already online, who already like them. It’s a question of converting that avid fan base into money. And that’s one thing Jackson didn’t have to worry about.

The first-week totals for these two artists are bound to be fairly divergent, but solid in their own ways. Neither will scrape the mass, intersubjective consciousness of the public the way Michael Jackson did. Mass communication, the vehicle of superstardom, is too fractured, too specialized, to allow that for the real pop stars of the moment.

The King of Pop is dead; long live the Republic.

What he managed to carve out was a role as a feel-good, socially conscious, new age rapper. His sensitivity occasionally verged on wussified, but ever-present was a realist soberness, concern for the squalor, troubled times, and hard lives of America's black underclass.

Common started his rap career as a Midwestern representative of all that made mid-'90s indie hip-hop so great. Soul- and funk-driven beats were matched by confessional, verbose rhymes that eschewed rims and strippers for more pressing, mature, and human concerns. He has spent the last decade slowly augmenting that image, adding a dash of hippie here, a smattering of black nationalist there, and musically rolling through soul's many incarnations, from psychedelic to '80s boogie.

What he managed to carve out was a role as a feel-good, socially conscious, new age rapper. His sensitivity occasionally verged on wussified, but ever-present was a realist soberness, concern for the squalor, troubled times, and hard lives of America's black underclass.

His latest, Universal Mind Control, out this week, has dropped the positivity in favor of a collection of bubbly, floor-filling beat surrenders revolving mostly around sexual conquest and macho posturing. Originally scheduled for release this past June, the album was pushed because of Common's acting obligations. While his dramatic roles thus far have been commendable (his Gap commercial notwithstanding), they've clearly sapped his will to make his music anything but dippy fun. It's not just weird to stop caring about struggle, challenge, resistance, and people, and focus on partying, sex, and decadence at this particular moment. It's actually kind of obscene. And it's maybe even stranger that this material was meant as a summer album, since this summer wasn't exactly without anxiety over the future of the country.

The first line Common drops is "This is / that automatic," and it's an appropriate intro to the title track, which blandly apes '80s electro (Newcleus, Afrika Bambaataa) from the vocoded chorus to the Kraftwerk-ish central synth line. Common's development has always sounded like a half-understood journey through a friend's really great record collection (say, ?uestlove's?), jumping from Sly & the Family Stone to Gil Scott Heron without necessarily digesting the substance so much as the style. Now it's the icy realms of black futurist electro, except in place of extra-terrestrial apocalypse, we get lame come-ons and brags that feel like put-ons.

Kanye West provided beats for most of the tracks on Common's last two albums, 2005's Be and 2007's Finding Forever, and despite his recent turn to Autotuned R&B, Mr. West actually filled those albums with raw, propulsive soul and funk sounds. Pharrell Williams and The Neptunes are at the helm for seven out of the 10 songs here (with contributions from Mr. DJ and Mr. West too), and the result is decidedly less organic, with those needed touches of soul, funk, and boogie edged out by techy, minimal beats.

Along with the ill-fitting backing, Common ranges over a bunch of genre raps he's obviously uncomfortable with, if not actually just bad at. From the bogus beefy boasts of horn-led "Gladiator" to the boudoir blech of "Punch Drunk Love" (alongside Mr. West), Common feels out of his element playing the tough guy or the jaded, sex-crazed player. When Cee-Lo shows up, on "Make My Day," the fickleness of Common's project is put into relief. Cee-Lo has been remarkably consistent in his approach and the employment of his vocal and lyrical force, through Goodie Mob to his solo career and through Gnarls Barkley. And even here, he manages a bright, gospel-tinged soul strut even as a guest star, while still masking darker emotional depth within his breezy smiling lines.

Wastes of time include the achingly flaccid electro-funk of "Sex 4 Sugar," which nods to the Jungle Brothers as it rips the group off, poorly, and the Biggie-ish "Announcement," where Common rhymes about his endorsement deals, explaining "Now we can push more whips / than slavery." Oof. Later he addresses being labeled "a philosopher" by "broads" and responds "yeah, I philosophize on top of ya!" Other tracks offer similar kind of karaoke flows (Sugar Hill Gang on "What a World").

The tracks that feel most like Common's past are the forgettable "Inhale" and, just before it, the drippy "Changes," which is also the only song addressing Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and was obviously, awkwardly written before his victory (odd for such a vocal supporter of the president-elect, and reportedly one of Obama's favorite artists). Yet vague assertions like "Life is in front of you / no need to look back again / victory can be claimed / while you're still battlin' " seem like a kind of "just playin', I'm really not a club-hopping jerk" mea culpa for the lazy brainlessness of the rest of the album, and are too little, too late. By the time we've reached the end of Universal Mind Control it literally feels like someone else's album. "Everywhere," a collaboration with Brit songstress Martina Topley-Bird, is a fast, synthy club track, and would actually sound much better if you just took out Common's lame couple of verses.

Along with Kanye West, T-Pain, and Lil Wayne (among an ever-expanding list of hip-hop and R&B stars), Akon soaks his vocals with the digital sheen of Autotune. Meanwhile the backing tracks consist mainly of slickly minimal, synth-driven beats. So despite the fact that this is perhaps his most emotionally raw material to date, it's never sounded so inhuman.

German electropop innovators Kraftwerk claimed proudly in their heyday some decades ago that the robotic sound of their music was not enough: they wanted to become robots. On Akon's latest album, "Freedom," out today, the Senegalese-raised, Atlanta-based singer has brought that dream to R&B, though in his case, automatism isn't the end in itself, just trendiness.

Along with Kanye West, T-Pain, and Lil Wayne (among an ever-expanding list of hip-hop and R&B stars), Akon soaks his vocals with the digital sheen of Autotune. Meanwhile the backing tracks consist mainly of slickly minimal, synth-driven beats. So despite the fact that this is perhaps his most emotionally raw material to date, it's never sounded so inhuman.

The sound is mitigated somewhat by the fact that Akon can carry a tune (West's latest suffers dismally because he most certainly cannot), and since his continuing narrative of sin and redemption (his 2004 debut was titled "Trouble" and the 2006 follow-up "Konvicted") has come to the redemption part. Though (he claims) his youth was spent drenched in crime and violence, he's simply better at crooning aggressive come-ons and preaching positivism than bragging about his rap sheet, as his biggest hit "I Wanna Love You," proved (the album version is less romantic/more direct: "I Wanna Fuck You").

The opening track sets the album's contemplative tone with the lament: "I wanna make up (right now now now) / I wish we never broke up (right now now now) / we need to link up (right now now now)." It's not the subliteracy of regret or weakness here, but of assuredness. Throughout the record Akon sports his digitized, throaty voice as a weaponized mix of outsized adoration and foregone conquest.

Akon's evidently taken cues from Ne-Yo's grown, sexy success, toning down the raunch (there's no "I Wanna Fuck You" or "Smack That" here) and turning to a more gentlemanly approach of flowery compliments and prostrate praise. Akon still wants to do it with you, ladies, and he more or less knows it's going to happen, but that's no reason to not treat you right.

Akon's fame is due in part, as with lots of pop stars, to his outsize persona. He's thrown fans off his stages, and offstage he likes to advocate polygamy and has bragged about owning his own diamond mine.

Part of that persona has always bled into his songs too, in the form of street-cred bad boy-ness. It still lingers, as on "Troublemaker."

Read the song's protagonist as a drug dealer, an outlaw biker, or just a heartbreaker. But that latter seems unlikely and too innocent amid all the alcohol, sex and gun talk. "We Don't Care" attempts to answer the question of how much public display of affection is too much. The answer is none.

Yet for the most part Akon puts a distance between the music and the performer that wasn't there two years ago. The title of the album was going to be "Acquittal," but as if to generalize the concept and separate it from a biographical moment, it was changed to "Freedom."

The tempos on "Freedom" are generally quicker than Akon's earlier work, and even guest stars are given the Autotune treatment. Akon calls it a turn to the "Euro-club sound," and most of the tracks here are indeed as epic as they are affectless (see also West's album), though reminiscent more of the hollow balladeering of someone like Howard Jones than of the pounding tech-blasts of Justice. The title track even has traces of Coldplay's more ready-made anthems; Akon has named Bono and Sting as contributors he hopes to attract to a remix of the song—the same remix.

"Sunny Day" is a kind of sober rumination on the good life from the perspective of someone who came from the bottom (Wyclef's guest verse is typically weak, reminding us yet again that he is originally from Haiti, not Jersey), and for whom reaching the boring world of comfort and affluence is a blessing and not an alternate life sentence.

Those departed fans of the sweeter, more tender side of the band may finally return to the halcyon sound as there's a brand new album collecting some of the band's numerous BBC sessions from 1996-2001 (with Mark Radcliffe, Steve Lamacq, as well as John Peel), which may as well be a greatest hits of B&S 1.0. Early printings come with a bonus disc containing a 2001 performance in Belfast. Fans of the band's latter days should pick up the album too, since the band remains on hiatus (the last album was 2006's The Life Pursuit) and won't be heading into the studio anytime soon. Plus if you've stayed with them this far, why not just be a completist already?

In keeping with the band's left-of-centerness, alongside excellent versions of favorites from the first four albums (like opener "The State I Am In") are goofy alternate versions (the glockenspiel-heavy "Lazy Line Painter Jane," "The Wrong Girl"), and more quirky evocations of the band's style during this period, like a quartet of unreleased songs from a 2001 session. Of these, the winners are the ultra-nerdy Go-Betweens paean "Shoot the Sexual Athlete," and "Nothing in the Silence," which addresses the departure of Isobel Campbell, the group's early wispy female voice/cellist. These are the last recordings the band made with Campbell; her departure is also seen by fans as a massive sea change. It's a fabulous set whether for a trip down memory lane or a gentle entry into the band's gentlest years; as opposed to their more recent live bombast, these early recordings are bashful, mannered, and utterly delicate-sounding.

Ostensibly, the dizzying roster of live shows in venues all over New York City, and the magazine behind it (College Media Journal, once College Music Journal) exist to provide new music to college radio programmers and, increasingly, to online outlets. There was a time when college radio was kicky and vital and reached a lot of young music consumers, and when CMJ (the magazine) was well-written, and sent out totally great quarterly CD's. That time is long past.

Past, too, is the time when the CMJ festival presented endless exciting options to scads of intrepid fans and industry folks. The endlessness is still there.

Times pop critic Jon Pareles, in his piece on the festival last week, suggests the fest is now held largely for the benefit of bloggers. It's a tempting hypothesis. The name change to "media," the youth-music market share that blogs do control, the constitutional snobbery.

Plus, the bulk of people "covering" the festival, supporting it, and actually learning about new music from it do seem to be bloggers. Who else would photograph (from many angles!) an unsigned Dutch band playing doomy synth-punk to about five people and hopping around like they're at a National Front rally on a Wednesday at 7?

Blogs are the perfect audience for CMJ's endlessness. Free of having to have opinions or make arguments, music blogs are mainly the province of boosterism, and with so many groups in town, every site can have its pick of obscure Next Big Things. Except it doesn't work that way, for the bloggers or really anyone else in attendance. Today's CMJ fest consists of a dozen or so buzzed about shows each night, and several dozen more shows that are ill-attended, feature wobbly lineups, and appear to benefit no one at all.

Lonesome, Siberian venues like Kenny's Castaways, Googie's Lounge, and Banjo Jim's host band after unknown band all week, day and night, and because of the overwhelming array presented by the festival, these showcases fall through the cracks. The bands at them are largely mediocre-to-terrible, but it's not their fault that the CMJ festival has become this self-perpetuating, baggy monster.

Simply put, the sea of unknown bands is more than daunting, it's paralyzing, and in the bargain nobody's learning anything they didn't know before. Where is the selection? The authority?

Wednesday night at Pianos the scene was electric, the room packed to see Chairlift, a band that plays shows like every week in New York and has a song in a freaking iPod commercial. This is not my beautiful marginality. By contrast there were precious few people filtering in and out of the Cake Shop midway through the following night, despite some good bands on a series of bills, not to mention watching an electric violinist backed up by an Oi! rhythm section. People crowd in and pack the hippest spots like the Levis/Fader Fort at Delancey and Bowery, but who treks out to Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg?

The point is, again, what's the point? If CMJ is about presenting new music they should democratize the distribution of bands, forcing people to take in stuff they know they want to see right alongside stuff they didn't know they wanted to see (or maybe stuff they'll be sorry they saw, but that's part of the fun too). Alternately, the festival should be dialed back by a lot, centralized, and made into an experience that means more than accruing cred points for catching the already-big-thing for the seventh time in a week.

On Tuesday, at Union Pool in Brooklyn, the showcase featured a dreadful, messy Jonathan Richman-inspired two-piece, followed by a most unpretentious group melding sunshiney hippie enthusiasm (sample lyric: "I can hear the grass grow!") with epic post-rock breakdowns (strangely, it worked), and rounded out by Army Navy, a band with some buzz going that did their Buzzcocks/DBs/Replacements thing with aplomb, especially the stunning cover of "Back Where We Started From" by Maxine Nightingale.

Point is, you don't get to hear such variety very often, and if it weren't for Army Navy, I would never have seen Big Tree (the post-rock hippies) or, yes, suffered through the opener. Sadly, barely anyone was there for the tragedy or the triumph, and there's no point in that.

"This is horrible!" said a long-haired portly guy, thrusting his iPhone at her. "These songs you're playing are so tired, man! Listen, we're in the industry. Trust us. Please put on my playlist. I cannot listen to this crap!"

The waitress said she'd have the check with the manager.

("Aw man, you're like fucking Sarah Palin or something!" he blustered back, confoundingly.)

The table eventually got its way (the customer who drops $900 is always right), and they're all smiles, like they've just written themselves a fat check, like they're educating the masses, but nobody starts nodding along or asking the bartender "Dude, what is this?" like that Beta Band scene in High Fidelity.

Observed this weekend at a Brooklyn wine bar: a crew of boomy-voiced 30-somethings harassing their waitress.

"This is horrible!" said a long-haired portly guy, thrusting his iPhone at her. "These songs you're playing are so tired, man! Listen, We're in the industry. Trust us. Please put on my playlist. I cannot listen to this crap!"

The waitress said she'd have the check with the manager.

("Aw man, you're like fucking Sarah Palin or something!" he blustered back, confoundingly.)

The table eventually got its way (the customer who drops $900 is always right), and they're all smiles, like they've just written themselves a fat check, like they're educating the masses, but nobody starts nodding along or asking the bartender "Dude, what is this?" like that Beta Band scene in High Fidelity. Nobody leaves in disgust, either. Everyone kind of ignores the playlist. It's a little loud to hear much anyway.

Yet controlling the playlist to your every move seems to be a central ambition in the music industry today. Forget the Internet, where music is plentiful but also available for free at every turn. Get to someone while they're trying on jeans, or eating sushi, or ordering a latte, or ordering a beer, or watching a fun teen romantic comedy, and you've got them captive to your playlist, subject to your product and, the hope is, susceptible to its charms. Convince them they're listening to the soundtrack of their lives, and they'll pay to own a copy.

Observed this weekend in a movie theater: a fun teen romantic comedy where a playlist (what we used to call a soundtrack) fully subsumes both character and narrative. The movie came in at No. 5 in the nation this weekend, while the soundtrack debuted at No. 52 on the Billboard Hot 200 chart. Atlantic even put out a limited edition vinyl release of the soundtrack, so the playlist must be doing something right.

Based on a hit young adult novel (which presumably made do without an iPod), Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist concerns a music-obsessed teenage guy, freshly dumped, who is brought together by chance with a music-obsessed girl, who is cute. Over the course of one night in New York they have some adventures, a few scrapes, and they fall in love. There's some shy dialogue, a couple of cute moments, one or two good jokes (a post-breakup mix CD called "Road to Closure Vol. 12."). They're nice kids; it would have been nice to hear more from them and a little less yapping from their costar, the playlist. Sometimes a song sparks dialogue, or provides the mood for an exchange, but mostly, the soundtrack stands in for conflict, consequence, development, all of it. In this scene the music means we're driving! In this scene, the music means the boy and girl feel something for each other, but are nervous!

When Nick & Norah do get to talk to each other, it's mostly stilted conversations about music, as had by people who have never thought about music in their lives. There's a sort of brag-off about which of them is a bigger fan of an elusive band whose secret show they're trying to find (my favorite! No, mine!), and they both love this one song, and Nick's iPod proves to Norah that they are musical soul mates. But scripting conversations about music is more awkward than having those conversations. Sharing a favorite song, going through someone's iPod, even listening to a mix with someone can be flirtatious yet wordless or chatty and convivial. Here it hovers in the middle, afraid to grab hold of music's power to connect people. These characters never talk about the way music makes them feel, they just sort of play on repeat. "Are you into stuff?" "Oh wow, I totally am!" Cut to making out.

What's missing here is some connection between what we see and what we hear. We know that our leads are music-obsessed teenagers because they tell us so, yet if the soundtrack were devoid of rock tunes by hip bands (Vampire Weekend, Band of Horses, We Are Scientists, Bishop Allen and Devendra Banhart), this would all be theoretical, and thin. While being specific about songs and bands can be awkward (Garden State and Juno proved that), being overly vague while trying to pin the whole movie on pop songs makes it seem hard to latch onto this particular playlist over, say, any other collection of songs. Mark Mothersbaugh (once of Devo), who could be said to have gotten the whole hip-soundtrack-overwhelming-film thing started with his work on Wes Anderson's films, oversaw this soundtrack. Nick & Norah got some terrific tunes, both by those cool now bands, but also from less known acts, like Big Star's Chris Bell, with his tender "Speed Of Sound," as well as the excellent Richard Hawley, with the torchy "Baby You're My Light." Still, without any genuine connection to the characters and the action, the tunes just sort of float in space. They're background with no foreground.

At one point in the film, Norah admits to a Judaic concept she finds really beautiful: that the world is broken and people are there to make it whole. Nick posits that perhaps the people themselves are what need to be brought together. They kiss. It's really rather sweet, and though the further connection isn't made explicit, it seems clear that the concept is meant to hold for the notion of the playlist as well, the thing brought together from disparate ends to form a cohesive whole, to tell a story. Trouble is that this playlist doesn't feel hard won, and neither does Nick and Norah's union, so that in the end all we've got is an hour and a half held hostage to someone's idea of the perfect playlist, and rather than feeling excited and educated at the end, one just feels like they could have been in a room trying on jeans.

Two very different artists, Ne-Yo and Raphael Saadiq, both veteran songwriters, producers and singers, offer different answers to such sky-is-falling questions with albums out this week.If we're lucky, R&B is in a state of flux; if we're not, it's dying slowly. Since the 90's, the genre (especially its male component) has rewarded banality, whether in the form of sexist histrionics dressed up as seduction, the sort of stuff that gets Chris Brown and Akon hits, or the too-often bloodless smoothness of Usher, Anthony Hamilton, and, maybe best of the bunch, John Legend. And then there's R. Kelly, who is, for reasons too complex to address here, unassailable. Club bangers and crooner crap are great, and everybody needs a little stupid fun, and that Usher sure can dance, but the alarmist tends to wonder whither the thoughtful, sensitive, passionate R&B of yore, the genre that brought us everything from the Temptations to the Jackson 5 to Jodeci? When did the beat start to eclipse, well, everything?

Two very different artists, Ne-Yo and Raphael Saadiq, both veteran songwriters, producers and singers, offer different answers to such sky-is-falling questions with albums out this week. Ne-Yo offers sincerity, maturity, and respect, a sound where hit-machine slickness is spiked with nods to the past. Saadiq embraces the past and little else, as he's been doing for years, asking why classic soul need be labeled "retro" if it can still represent the world we inhabit.

"Me, I have a very short attention span, always have," Ne-Yo explained on his blog-cum-marketing-Web site, "so I get bored EXTRA easy. So with everybody doin' the same ol' thing, wearing the same ol' thing, sounding the same, my question is, how is everybody else NOT bored??" Tough talk, Ne-Yo, but that kind of rhetoric sort of demands you actually supersede convention. Year of the Gentleman, out today, does not reinvent the wheel, or even reinvent Ne-Yo. It differs little from his 2006 multi-platinum In My Own Words or last year's Because of You, which won a Grammy. But across its twelve tracks, Year of the Gentleman conveys, mainly in straight-ahead narratives, the challenges and thrills of a mature love life, and does so seriously and, on occasion, inventively. There's heartbreak, lies, and lust aplenty, but Ne-Yo strives for virtue where most court only vice. He's said the album is his attempt to convey Rat Pack style and sophistication. But it's not the musical style of Sinatra, Sammy, or Dino that he's quoting—it's the image Ne-Yo is selling, of door-holding respect, suaveness, and nice hats. Aided by production duo StarGate (Erik Hermansen and Mikkel S. Eriksen), the album's sound owes much to the template Michael Jackson crafted with Rod Temperton and Quincy Jones in his golden era. Year of the Gentleman eschews the blustery basslines of most R&B for popping disco tempos, tinny guitars and horns, and clubby synth sweeps. He pulls off the heavy reference, in part because of his considerable talent as a writer.

Now 28, Ne-Yo first made a name for himself barely out of his teens, penning hits for Janet Jackson, Enrique Iglesias, and Celine Dion. More recent clients include Rihanna ("Unfaithful," "Take a Bow") and Beyoncé ("Irreplaceable"). Those earlier collaborations help explain Ne-Yo's sort of automatic high profile, but they also explain his comfort with schmaltz, and why his songs often wander into epic cheese land (think "I Believe I Can Fly). Of course heartbroken keening and larger than life drama are almost requirements for R&B, but Ne-Yo is best his when anguish is couched in a peppy groove rather than a sluggish weeper.

The album's got a few hits already. There's the hooky, sorta feminist "Miss Independent," which idolizes women's success in the workplace over a clappy, stutter-step beat. It's kind of the reverse of Kanye's "Gold Digger," but getting revved up because "her bills are paid on time" is, as explained here last week, an oddly fiscal kind of sex-drive. Lead-in "Closer" stars another dominant female, this time an irresistible temptress: "I can feel her on my skin / I can taste her on my tongue / she's the sweetest taste of sin / the more I get the more I want! / She wants to own me / come closer, she says come closer" and the chorus explains, "I just can't stop." The high-range vocals and gentle disco of the track are the first taste of Michael Jackson homage, which continues throughout ("I always do at least one, every album"). Another potential hit, "Single," gets clever with the double meaning of that word, with Ne-Yo reaching out of the song (or single) to satisfy (single) ladies ("baby I'll be your boyfriend / be your boyfriend 'til the song goes off,"). Though Ne-Yo rarely trots out guest stars (to his great credit), this track features the backing harmonies, finger snaps, grunts, and, um, rapping of New Kids on the Block. "You are a Billboard, and the product you're advertising is YOU," he advises his blog readers, so why invite some other billboards to distract the customer?

The album misfires, at least lyrically, when it takes gentlemanly virtue and crams it down your throat. Ne-Yo finger-wags against going to bed angry ("Mad") and rattles off treacly, groan-inducing superlatives about his lady atop an over-programmed wall-of-digi ("Part of the List"). "Why Does She Stay" finds the balance, as Ne-Yo plays the bad boyfriend over a snaking piano line and some spacey effects: "she's so much better than me / I'm so unworthy of her!" It's a great tune, but tragically there's a follow-up, wherein the bad boyfriend (still unworthy Garth!) vows to change his ways and turn it all around ("Stop This World"). The only moment on the album where Ne-Yo truly cuts loose, and brings more to the game than just good manners is "So You Can Cry," which admits its debt to influence with affected pops and clicks, like a scratchy old record, while Stevie Wonder woodwinds and harpsichord are underpinned by a rock beat. Ne-Yo claims Billy Joel is an influence, so who knows what the future holds?

Raphael Saadiq has made a career traversing the history of soul music. His first band, Tony! Toni! Toné!, helped invent New Jack Swing and, to a degree, the wet-hankie R&B that presaged Usher and his ilk. When that band broke up, Saadiq formed short-lived Lucy Pearl with En Vogue's Dawn Robinson and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest, then went solo, releasing his debut in 2002. The Grammy-nominated Instant Vintage was a sort of unashamed mission statement, focused on soul-drenched revivalism. In 2004 he released Raphael Saadiq as Ray Ray, a blaxploitation-inspired album. Along the way he's produced artists including Macy Gray, the Roots, D'Angelo, John Legend, Whitney Houston, Mary J. Blige, and more. With all of them he's pushed a classic aesthetic, heavy on organic sounds and light on studio magic, deeply indebted to the past and distrustful of easy formulas.
Yet never has Saadiq played on the past so heavily, so insistently, as on his latest, The Way I See It.

Recorded with no samplers or sequencers in sight, on vintage gear and with contributions from like-minded revivalists (Joss Stone appears on "Just One Kiss,") and icons of the past (Ne-Yo may channel Stevie Wonder, but Stevie's actually on this album, playing harmonica on "Never Give You Up"). Saadiq's currently touring with a nine-piece band, complete with muscular horn section and backup singers, and his style reflects his content, as he's taken to donning the slim suits and slimmer ties of young Marvin Gaye and pulling off reserved spins onstage like all the Four Tops rolled into one. In interviews, Saadiq is defensive about being reduced to a mere mimic. Lucky for him he's a hell of a songwriter, and a talented producer, so the heavy reverb effects and blown-out sounding vocals sound vibrant, even fresh, while smart lyricism shouts out clearly from the present day.

"Let's Take a Walk" is a good example; over a bluesy boogie Saadiq lays down some pretty contemporary frankness: "This place is crowded / Don't know bout' you / I need some sex / Some sex with you." It can be fun to pick Saadiq's influences. Here's Curtis Mayfield ("Keep Marchin' "), there's Smokey ("Love That Girl"), and here come the Stylistics ("Oh Girl"). Yet while the album's best track, "Sometimes," borrows heavily from Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," it tells a stirring tale, apparently inspired by Saadiq's mother, of the exhaustion encountered when universal hardships are compounded by the weight of racism. There's a fine balance on the album between innocent love tunes, raging soul burners, and message songs. "Callin," presents a bilingual doo-wop style, while "Staying In Love" is a great bit of dancefloor fire and funky "Big Easy" manages to cast Hurricane Katrina as the villain in a romance, tearing lovers apart.

What both of these artists summon is a sense of how traditions can be encountered without sacrificing an insistent cultural currency. Ne-Yo doesn't take the kind of chances that yield music for the ages, but in such a stifled climate his reserved boundary-pushing is notable. Saadiq, though he's clearly haunted by music-for-the-ages, or perhaps because he is, manages to create fresh sounds outside the prevailing trends of today. What they share is confidence—the confidence to say they're bored and do something about it; the confidence to resist the constant imperative to drive on when you steer just as well in the rearview.