At the time I was friends with Pam Beesly on MySpace.

Season 2 of the American version of The Office is my favorite TV show ever, and because I am a glutton for punishment, I've been using tonight's series finale mostly as an excuse to understand how old I and my tastes (and the DVDs I watched all those Jim and Pam moments on over and over) are getting.

For instance: When I think of the best years of The Office, two songs come immediately to mind. One is "Mambo No. 5," Michael Scott's increasingly sad paragon of coolness. The other is "Sing," by Travis, which Jim and Pam listen to (so poignantly) with one set of white iPod earbuds on a date they refuse to admit is a date.

The "Mambo No. 5" fad was an embarrassing six years old during Season 2 of The Office. That non-date aired seven-and-a-half years ago. If your musical self-identity was ever wrapped up, as Jim's is in the moment, with hunting down new music and downloading it (or ripping CDs!) to a big white iPod, you must confront this fact: Your new music is getting old.

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Vampire Weekend -- the album -- sounded a lot like Graceland, inasmuch as most of us hadn't heard that bright Afropop guitar tone on any other albums in the intervening 20 years, and Ezra Koenig's lyrics were as epigrammatic as Paul Simon's, if in a different way. It wasn't just the guitar, even though it was probably mostly the guitar -- the rhythms, his voice, most everything else on the album sounded foreign, if not actually African. It sounded unfamiliar.

And using "Afropop" as shorthand for that unfamiliarity -- the stuff in Vampire Weekend that wasn't self-consciously Ivy League or more broadly indie-sounding -- turned out to be extremely convenient. It worked for Contra, too, though not as well.

But Modern Vampires of the City came out Tuesday, and the guitars have mostly vanished -- only the other stuff is left. We need to call a moratorium: It's time to stop using "Afropop" when you mean "Vampire Weekend."

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Tempe Tavern's Unfun show is now an Unfun fundraiser.

[The Valley is a big place, and it puts out more interesting music than we could ever hope to cover. Every week or so, Mike Bogumill will use this space to cover a little more of it. - Ed.]

The goal of this column is to document, explore, and create awareness for interesting things happening in local music, casting a broad net over current events in the Valley's various scenes.

Cover the Crescent: Punk Rock Edition - Crescent Ballroom - May 14

A while ago, there was a documentary produced called One Nine Nine Four. Narrated by Tony Hawk, it presented a triumphant narrative of the "punk rock explosion" of the 1990s, as evidenced by the growth of labels like Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords and the commercial success of bands like The Offspring and Green Day. An undercurrent of the work -- not really emphasized by Mr. Hawk's narrative but suggested by interviews in the film with people such as Brett Gurewitz and Mark Hoppus -- was that the punk explosion saw the incursion of large commercial entities into what once was a strictly underground scene.

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I have never once been so confused by a song as I was the first time someone told me to listen to "Stick Stickly," by Attack Attack! All I'd been told was that it was the source of the animated GIFs I'd started seeing all over the internet, in which a band's synchronized guitar power-moves suddenly went full-crab--that they were the progenitors of "crabcore," which was probably not a real genre.

For 30 seconds they sounded about like the band in the animated GIF looked--loud, screamy. That's when the autotune came in.

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Granted, lots of Jay-Z fans look like this now.

Had Baz Luhrmann decided to take things even remotely seriously in his adaptation of The Great Gatsby, he could've just used the Bryan Ferry Orchestra's 2012 album The Jazz Age in its entirety, instead of merely inviting Ferry to supply two incongruous songs for its soundtrack.

But nothing about Luhrmann's adaptation bears the weight of seriousness, and so we're left with Jay-Z's predictably over-the-top, predictably catchy, predictably fun soundtrack instead. All well and good, to be sure, and a suitable record to spin at the beginning of your well-intentioned Gatsby-themed cocktail party, before all your friends get too drunk and just ask you to start playing Skrillex anyway.

Since the consensus is essentially that the hyperactive film is a mess and the scattershot soundtrack pretty doggone successful, it's worth asking how they fit together -- whether this mash-up of well-to-do Roaring '20s misadventure and modern hip-hop/pop, well, works.

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Arrested Development ruined the Segway. Lots of things ruined the Segway -- don't get me wrong -- but the first time Gob Bluth made his dramatic, perfectly self-confident entrance into the frame on his fanny-packed Segway, he instantly summed up all the worries people had about them. Will this make me look ridiculous? Will I look like a conceited jerk for driving one? Would it be cool to put a fanny pack on the front of it?

That was one thing Arrested Development did well and frequently: It could point out exactly what was ridiculous in something -- almost in passing -- and it could target that ridiculous thing so narrowly and frequently that it almost felt affectionate, after a while. "The Final Countdown" by Europe was one of those things, and one of several songs that got that treatment.

Now it's in the long, long, long, long-awaited Arrested Development Season 4 trailer, which you can see after the jump (if you haven't already.)

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Jon Åslund

Music-discovery apps like Spotify and Pandora are free, but they have social costs. Among them: Every six months or so, we get an open letter from an artist who is being cut comically tiny checks for thousands of plays on one service or another. This week, it's musician and label-owner Blake Morgan, who reportedly made $1.62 for 27,900 spins on Pandora.

Having seen enough tiny checks by now -- having heard the arguments that are made on one side and the other after each tiny check hits the blogs for a couple of days -- I'm down to one hypothesis to suggest: The Internet startup business model is especially ill-suited for artists of all kinds. It's hard to pay somebody for music or words or video when your medium-term goal isn't profit, and Spotify and Pandora have never consistently made money.

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Yeah, definitely.

If you and I visit the same Weezer forums, you've probably had Rivers Cuomo's J-Pop album -- okay, Rivers Cuomo and Scott Murphy of Allister's J-Pop album -- for a while now. If you don't visit the same Weezer forums I do, now's your chance: It was released Monday on iTunes. It's called Scott & Rivers, the single is "Homely Girl," and it doesn't sound quite as much like that photo as you think it does.

But it does sound a little like that photo.

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I don't want to bury the lede, here: There's a video, in this post, of Go Daddy founder and local philanthropist Bob Parsons making a smoke-filled introduction to AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" next to a bunch of scantily clad dancing girls, getting a big round of applause for saying, "Nuke the Chinese [just kidding]," and saying we can wear buffalo heads because we live in America.

But all that arrives on Up on the Sun by way of a press release from "patriotic rock band Madison Rising," who announced Tuesday that Parsons had "sent them a surprise $10,000 check days after seeing the band perform in Scottsdale" at the Bike Week Blast-Off Party.

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Belvis

Digital Leather, the synthpunk brainchild of Shawn Foree, has evolved quite a bit since the Arizona musician started it as a solo project. In concert, Foree shares the stage with members of The Reatards, Destruction Unit, Lenguas Largas, The Wongs, and Lost Sounds. Digital Leather recently expanded its synth section by adding The Faint's Todd Fink to the band.

"Todd brought synth back into Digital Leather -- something that had been missing for a long time. He has helped renew my love of synths, and writing music in general," says Foree. Find out more after the jump.

Read More: Download Digital Leather's Young Doctors in Love.

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