So today, the perfect segue from a bunch of writing about the life of the prof, to what (this) prof loves writing about: popular music. With a couple of colleagues, I’ve proposed a panel for an upcoming popular music conference on the topic of the urban/rural/suburban matrices of post-Woodstock music (roughly). One of us is [...]
Robyn & I recently watched an episode of 30 Rock—best exercise DVDs ever—in which one of the subplots was Tracy Jordan’s becoming obsessed with Hollywood’s “Rule of Three”: bad things happen in threes. Where there’s a high-profile celebrity death, two more are bound to follow in short order. Of course, it’s a perfectly self-fulfilling prophecy: [...]
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 [...]
An embarrassingly “lite” post for today—and what’s more, I’m going to try to make you, Dear Reader, do the work. It’s in the form of one of those analogy tests. Look at these two examples and, having sussed out the pattern, suggest other examples of your own? Talking Heads, “Radio Head” (from True Stories) = Radiohead [...]
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 dropped the story of Ice-T and “Cop Killer” midway on Thursday, in deference to our regular Friday feature, Mystery Science Auditorium; let’s finish up that story now. The song was “greeted” with predictable, and not altogether unreasonable, outrage. Tipper Gore went after Body Count in The Washington Post, comparing Ice-T’s message to “Hitler’s anti-Semitism [...]
Having had some time to simmer down a bit, I’m a lot less hot under the collar about Michiko Kakutani’s “Texts Without Context” than I was last week. I still think it’s riddled with deplorably sloppy thinking; and in that, I still think it’s entirely characteristic of her work as a critic. But there are [...]