When a band like this bows, when a massive hole is left in the collective musical lexicon, I refuse to believe that it means nothing. That is to say, this band was both important and “important” and they are going to leave a void. The musical one is obvious, but what about the culture? No one moved the so-called hipsters to dance like James Murphy did, and no one was as self-aware and questioning about what that meant than he. We can consider it the apex of late 00′s defining sound, and as I said earlier an apex is inherently followed by a fall.

No one in K-Holes is gay, yet they went out of their way to make a video that will surely tax the right hands of their homo fan base. The more that a gay/grunge aesthetic intersects with Butt Magazine’s “legitimate porn” leanings and the ongoing domination of indie-queers in urban spaces, the more we are likely to get art like this. XTube hero Black Spark is currently the pioneer in this area but its pretty cool to see it spread out to another medium. I don’t generally expect to see boner-inducing content on Stereogum, but I guess there aren’t a lot of music videos like this.

Can your favorite song – with no other context – really be that special?
I’ve been hard pressed to make a play list in the last 2.5 years that didn’t include this song. It begins with “Be My Baby” drums and a sweetly evocative verse that would make Petula Clark wake up in the subway with goosebumps, leads to a chorus on the perils of unquestioning commercialism and then segues into full out dance jam so that you can’t help screaming along with the closing “yeah yeahs!” and wishing it went on forever.

t’s that time again, folks! When the air is chill, the sky is grey and most blog readers and writers have their minds on things like presents, eggnog and avoiding a groping from the TSA. A time when the year-end list is king and there is nary a post in site that isn’t counting something down from the prior 12 months.

Here, in that tradition, is the second-annual list of my top queerest indie songs released in the preceding year . They tend to fall in three categories: Awesome songs by queer artists, songs by straight artists with overt queer themes or undertones, or the rare intersection: the queer artist with an overtly queer-themed song.

I mark, you mark, we all mark for Denmark! Ok, I’m on a megabus back from a long busy week in New York and might not be operating at full mental capacity right now. How about this: Danish chill-waver Keith Canisius has shown that if anything actually is rotten in Denmark it’s because the sun-drenched flavor of songs like Beach House has heated up the country so much that no one can eat the mayonaise.

I’ve been thinking back to my dark high school days as a result of IGB. I never seriously considered suicide (a rife family history set some nice counter-examples) but I did have some bad times. It’s great that people as straight and high profile as Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama have chimed in, but I know that when I was 15 nothing had the power to make me feel better than a good song. So I offer these not as an opposition to the existing videos, just another way point in the conversation.

Gay icons (the good ones) tend to be talented, confident and different. The video above, where Nancy lends her vocals to Shit Robot’s “Take ‘Em Up” proves the first two points (That strut. That strut! It’s better than Santigold’s!) but the real draw to the queer community comes from the difference.

In LCD, and to a lesser degree The Juan MacLean, Nancy is what is different onstage. She’s a Chinese-American woman in a band and record label mostly known for scruffy alt-y white guys. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she handles the refrain of “You can normalize, don’t it make you feel alive” in LCD’s “Get Innocuous.” Women make such perennial icons because of the extra work they have to make it in their given industry and non-white rockers are still less-than-prominent in the indie-scape.

A recent issue of GQ ranked the 25 hottest women in rock (past and present) and included Ms. Case with the above photo. It always weirds me out to see her as a pin-up, especially alongside other GQ mainstays like Katy Perry. She’s gorgeous, that’s undebatable, but some part of me feels like she took some Maxim-esque shots a couple years ago and they are going to haunt her through men’s magazines until her hair turns white and she does a posthumous, late-career duet with Nat King Cole. Musicalal Sex Symbols often get written about as boobs first, music second, and that is so against the spirit of Neko that she looks as in place in GQ as a black person at the Restoring Honor Rally.

No one believes that I don’t do coke, or never have. But its true. All my inability to stand still, micromachine vocal pacing and manic exuberance comes from someplace inside me, not a plastic baggie. Does it even come in plastic? It’s kind of embarrassing that I don’t know.

So to really do justice to the experience, I put together an alphabetical primer to the Crystal Castles live experience, like what Theodore Geisel would write if he was on mushrooms