So, after yesterday’s stunning setup, today I shall deliver the coup de grâce, establishing forever the artistic and affective poverty of the Steely Dan oeuvre. Ahem. I can’t think of any way to get where I’m going, but obliquely. Here’s a first attempt: a few days ago I mentioned, in a different context, the “title” [...]
Mes Chères, Working on my summer research, I was trying to remember something I thought I’d said about U2 in a review essay published back in 1994 in the online journal Postmodern Culture. When I found it and re-read it, I was surprised, actually, that I had written it: it’s been so long since I’ve [...]
The timing of Here Come the Warm Jets could hardly have been more auspicious: besides the mounting friction within Roxy Music, the three main streams within rock & roll were teetering on the brink of artistic bankruptcy; Here Come the Warm Jets served eviction notices on them all. Blues-based guitar rock (cf. Led Zeppelin), progressive [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Desert Island Discs, and as will be obvious from my writing last week, at least two or three Radiohead albums seem to me absolutely essential. I’d like to talk today and tomorrow about another; I’ll admit right here up front that in part, this is about why an [...]
[Just a reminder: this is the fourth in a five-part series exploring the greatness that is Radiohead. If you haven't read the first three, skip down the page to Saturday, June 12, and work your way forward.] Four quick time-cue beeps sweep us into “Paranoid Android.” If the popular long-running BBC radio program has taught [...]
Second of five on Radiohead. If you didn’t read yesterday, you might scroll down and start there. . . . Such social and psychic displacement has long been a topic in popular music, as well, but the music of Radiohead doesn’t just take alienation as a theme: this isn’t, in other words, merely the “teenage [...]
My thesis, in yesterday’s post, was that Twitter and Facebook together have made attending a conference a lot richer, and a lot more complicated. Which are perhaps two ways of saying the same thing. Richer (cont.): I’m sure all of this—the invasion of conferences by Twitter and Facebook—isn’t news to many of you; I’m sure [...]
So, it’s high time to bring this unpremeditated mini-thread on rock cover versions to a close—or at least to put it on pause for awhile. Hoping to make this all a bit more interactive, I thought I’d post my list of Top 10 covers, and invite y’all to post yours—or even individual entries—in Comments. I’m [...]
So, as promised, a more detailed response to a few representative tracks from Peter Gabriel’s new covers album, Scratch My Back. I prefaced my first post with a few lines from “Shock the Monkey”—Gabriel’s repeated imperative, “cover me.” He seems to have misunderstood his own instructions as “shroud me,” or perhaps “bury me.” The opening [...]