I’m just back from a week on the road: Yeah, all those fcrp posts over the past week about the homoerotics of the power ballad, and about Jimi Hendrix—as well as Emily Dalton’s piece on bump ‘n’ grinding second graders—werr pre-loaded, scheduled for release as I traveled! The shape-shifting miracle of the Internet. At any [...]
[The second in a two-part post started yesterday, previously published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.] In the documentary All You Need Is Love (2008), Tony Palmer quotes Eric Burdon, of the Animals: “If you want to see what an American black is going through today, where his mind is at, go see Jimi Hendrix, [...]
[Regular readers of fcrp know Jean Tamarin, my editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education. This piece ran there first, last month, and is better (as always) for Jean's tender mercies. This is part one of a two-parter that we'll finish tomorrow.--K] The prejudices we absorb when young—musical, culinary, racial—are so very hard to overcome. [...]
[This Friday, Dear Readers, guest blogger Emily Dalton’s gonna break down Mystery Science Auditorium for you. Emily’s a freelance writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon, and a faithful reader of fake chinese rubber plant. Enjoy!] When I first saw this video it was widely available on American sites, but it has now been pulled—I [...]
As I suggested in the first of these posts, American heterosexual masculinity is nothing if not confusing. What’s remarkable, I think, is that rock provides a safe place to work through some of those contradictions; and American culture generally, but rock’s subcultures more specifically, tacitly give rock a general amnesty from its otherwise very rigid [...]
I suggested yesterday that we might think of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” as a kind of alternative-rock power ballad, and I promised to run through the song’s emotional arc. It starts simply, with Thom Yorke singing softly over a strummed acoustic guitar. The musical texture builds with each verse, adding by degrees bass, cello, electric [...]
Visually, the Pacer is the concert venue writ small, with three of the five passengers wearing rock t-shirts; its distinctive (ugly) contours suggest a listening space, albeit an extraordinarily cramped, and necessarily intimate, one. The scene is funny and familiar; heavy-metal kids, headbanging in the suburbs, trying to make some fun. But they’re also, in [...]
So now that I’ve got your attention. I’d like to begin by reviewing with you a scene from a popular movie in which all of these elements come together. It is also the scene which, more than a decade ago, got me started thinking about all of this. I’ve discussed this scene from Wayne’s World [...]
In what I’m going to do over the next five days, my “reach” will far exceed my “grasp,” as the saying goes. For it seems to me that in a blog post (or even a series of related posts), one really has two choices: either to establish a modest goal and hit it, or else [...]
A few weeks ago, a reader posted a comment asking, in essence: How do I do it? A burning question for many fcrp fans, I know. A question that surely calls to mind Elvis Costello’s “My Science Fiction Twin”: His almost universal excellence Is starting to disturb me They asked how in the world he [...]