Lady Gaga’s got nothing very new going on right now: a new, eagerly awaited album in the can, of course, but for now, a temporary lull in her frentetic output. And during that lull, I was asked by a student group on campus to address the question: “What, if anything, is new about Lady Gaga’s presentation of [...]
I’m not sure what the critical consensus was on Brian Eno’s recent collaboration with David Byrne, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (2008), but the album’s certainly not going to reach the canonical status of their first project, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981). Everything that Eno does is an event, or anticipated [...]
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 2 of 4] The name “Santana” points always in two directions: both to the band originally called the Santana Blues Band (shortened to Santana by the release of their first album), as well as the band’s founder and lead guitarist. The ambivalence captured in that name—is Santana a band or a man?—registers something [...]
OK homeskillets, an assignment for all y’all today. I’ve long been interested in a category of musical event that, in my snooty literary theory mode, I’m likely to call the semiotics of pop music—and in my popular voice, I might venture to call body rock. I’m convinced that these little moments, when the real human [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Who’d have thought it? Ziggy, the Starman, the Man Who Fell to Earth, the Thin White Duke, the Heathen—is now a trailing spouse? The New York Times, and then Rolling Stone, recently made the obvious . . . well, obvious, by reporting that Bowie’s mired in something of a career hiatus. “Is David Bowie Retiring [...]
Today’s not our video Friday, kids—Mystery Science Auditorium—but this video is hosted at the Pitchfork.com site for this week only, so I thought I’d put it out here today, to give you a chance to have a look at it. Besides, I’m not really going to try to dig into the video itself (truth be [...]
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 [...]