I first became aware of the weirdo Liverpool band Clinic when my oldest daughter Emily bought me their 2002 album, Walking with Thee; I loved it almost immediately, and love it still. I haven’t kept up with their work in the interim, but they’ve got a new album, Bubblegum, scheduled for release on October 5—almost [...]
So yeah, that new Eminem video. Fans and critics are greeting it as a return to form, and for good reason; I don’t think it’s destined to become one of Eminem’s classic tracks, but he’s in superb rapping form, with phrasing that constantly surprises and some of that machine-gun delivery, spittin’ out the syllables, that’s [...]
[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 last in a five-part series exploring the greatness that is Radiohead. If you haven't read the first four, skip down the page to Saturday, June 12, and work your way forward.] The battle of the voice for transcendence is nowhere more memorably staged in Radiohead’s work than in the video [...]
[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 [...]
[Just a reminder: this is the third in a five-part series exploring the greatness that is Radiohead. If you haven't read the first two, skip down the page to Saturday, June 12, and work your way forward.] On Radiohead’s second album, The Bends, the same mythic battle plays out in songs like the first single, “Fake [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
[Final installment in a three-part posting, republishing an essay that first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education last September.--KD] I’ve already suggested that for some of us, the appeal of the bad voice is that it could be ours; more generally, we respond to bad voices because they sound so frail, so human. There’s [...]
Before turning the tables and looking at how rock can steal from the language of advertising and mess with its head and language, let’s look at just one more example of luxury goods slumming in rock’s bad neighborhoods. The woman in Pearl Jam’s “Better Man” is seemingly a victim of domestic violence, though one whom [...]