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 [...]
[Today's post comes to us courtesy of my old college roomate Steve Long, President of Aspen Ridge Capital Management. We met almost immediately as freshmen at UC Davis and enjoyed/endured one another's music over the duration of our undergraduate years.] I’ve theorized with Kevin that a blog posting (of his) that’s too deeply and carefully [...]
[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 [...]
[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. [...]
Blesséd Readers, Boing Boing posted this picture the other day, which has been re-posted across the ‘net and occasioned much indie hand ringing, along the lines of, Rock Just Isn’t What It Used to Be. The poster was sent to Boing Boing by “reader Simon,” who told the web site, “I found this stuck to [...]
[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 in yesterday’s post about the new Lady Gaga video, “Telephone,” I got her only as far as her processing at the County Jail. And what, you might ask, does any of this have to do with the song “Telephone”? Nothing. There are a couple of glimpses of a cell phone (Virgin Mobile, to be [...]