Thanks to my friend Michael Coyle for today’s provocation. The term “hipster”—which just a couple of years ago would have seemed as lame and dated as “cat” or “daddy-o”—has inexplicably become “hip” again. Pomona student Tim McKee wrote a great paper about this last year; I owe most of what I know about it to [...]
I mentioned my college’s station yesterday, KDVS at UC Davis, and should at least follow up that breadcrumb. What I remember most, I suppose, is a 2-hour-plus-long live interview with David Thomas from Pere Ubu—Davis, California, to Cleveland, Ohio. In the middle of the day. Back when one had actually to pay exorbitantly for “long [...]
Faithful readers of fake chinese rubber plant will know by now that while the blog is generally about contemporary culture—its delights and discontents—I find myself coming back time and again to the fertile intersection of contemporary music and everyday life. It’s my Crossroads (though I haven’t sold my soul to the devil; nor can I [...]
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 [...]
More significant, perhaps, is the fact that much of the communal activity of rock-music consumption has been driven underground. Given the copyright maximalism of legislation like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the hyperactive enforcement regime of the Recording Industry Association of America—whose prosecutorial zeal against college students since January 2003 has been [...]
The biggest strike against summer music festivals is that festival music sounds awful. The logistics of the Lollapalooza staging requires one-hour breaks between acts performing on the same stage; after one act has cleared out, the next has perhaps 40 minutes to set up, so there’s no time for a decent sound check. And projecting [...]
Those headphones on our students bother teachers because they seem to symbolize a voluntary deafness and a concomitant isolation. Allan Bloom put it most memorably, if artlessly, when he complained in The Closing of the American Mind that “as long as they [our students] have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition [...]
Friends & neighbors: Music festival season is officially upon us, and I thought I’d regale you, over the next few days, with a piece about my experience at Lollapalooza a few years ago. A couple words of explanation are in order. First, it was written three years ago, and much has changed: to read these [...]