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 [...]
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 [...]
[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 [...]
[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. [...]
[Big ups to reader Ken for suggesting the topic of today’s post.—KD] The first time it ever happened: Ah, I remember it well. I was in high school; it was the fall of ‘74. I was a nerd, and my favorite band, my one real passion, was the British progressive-rock group Yes. And some kid [...]
[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 [...]
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 [...]
Cover me when I run Cover me through the fire . . . Cover me, darling please –Peter Gabriel, “Shock the Monkey” So, I should have listened to Paul. I was visiting him in Philadelphia last week, and when he picked me up at the train station, he had just turned off Peter Gabriel’s Scratch [...]