As promised/threatened yesterday—and what a vibrant conversation yesterday, y’all!—I want to work through some impressions of The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006), a pretty riveting documentary recommended to me by fcrp reader Steve. It turned out to be a great way to redeem a long stretch of otherwise exasperating insomnia last week. But you don’t [...]
So after the tough sledding of the past few days, it’s time for us all to frolic a bit in the shallow end of the cultural pool: it is, after all, still summer, and Labor Day’s just around the corner. Here, then, a parlor game: What are your ten favorite “rock movies”? That phrase wobbles [...]
Well, this is an interesting problem to have: the comments on yesterday’s post, from Ken, Scott, Susie, Tim—they’re just wonderful. Between them, amongst them, they’ve effectively stolen my “thunder”—and seem, without having seen it, to be running through Steve’s outline on the topic, as well. I’d thought it would take a couple more posts to [...]
[Part 4 of 4] But what price popularity? Though it’s hard to find a truly critical word written about Supernatural, given the excitement of Santana’s long-time fans at his return to the spotlight, in fact it’s a rather uneven record. The collaborative tracks on Supernatural and the 2002 follow-up album Shaman (featuring appearances by Musiq, [...]
Back in the 60s, in an attempt to attract a new generation of the faithful back into the fold, American Catholics pioneered “folk worship” services: Sunday mass in which an acoustic guitar led young congregants in praise and worship songs. It represented a brush with ecumenicism, as well as a flirtation with popular youth culture: [...]
So as promised/threatened yesterday, three songs that operate roughly along the lines of the songs suggested by [correction!] faithful fcrp reader Steve: Songs that seem to be moving in one direction, carrying us merrily along, only to dart suddenly in another direction. Or in which a single word or phrase has an undue amount of [...]
Somebody—U. Kentucky musicologist Kevin Holm-Hudson, I believe—posted a link on Facebook yesterday to a story in The Onion, with this intro: “Yet another strange musical twist in Dylan’s long storied career. Wonder what Greil Marcus would say about this? .” Hours and hours later, there are still no comments to Kevin’s post, and I think [...]
Changes in the format and delivery of music—in both technology and packaging—would seem to have spelled the death of context for contemporary popular music, liner notes being only one element of that context. Our music has become much more a part of our multitasking lifestyle, only rarely indulged in as the sole focus of our [...]
[I threatened, about a week ago, to run a story I'd written about the demise of liner notes; here it is. It was written almost two years ago, so a couple of temporal references are no longer quite accurate; I haven't attempted to correct them. I was also shocked to see that I'd rehearsed my [...]
[It's late Thursday, and tomorrow's post should be a Mystery Science Auditorium post; and ordinarily, I don't post until 5:00 a.m. PST. But I have exciting news today, big enough to break both of those self-imposed rules, just this once. So here's Friday's post, on Thursday night.] For reasons both professional and personal, it’s a [...]