A couple weeks ago, I was sitting around my motel room, eating, listening to music and waiting for the Michigan game to start. I had my “2pac Toggling List” on, which is a bunch of ‘Pac and a bunch of other really violent, uncompromising gangsta rap. We all know the drill on this stuff by … Read more“How Gangsta Rap Could Usher in a Post-Musical Age: My ‘2pac Toggling List’”
If only for the sheer mass of cultural pressure administered by women in their 20s or 30s craving more music to drive to prom to, Green Day has released a record that sounds like it could be by Fall out Boy. Gone are all of the stylistic flares and forays that made Father of All… … Read more“It Looks Like Green Day Has Finally Taken the Logical Progression and Released a Fall out Boy Record”
There are things the new generation does that are just different. Let’s face it. They’d be loath before the idea of going into a Pizza Hut, ordering, and then sitting there for 10 minutes without a smart phone, while the stuff’s getting cooked. This would be my comfort zone, as it were. Recently, anyway, this … Read more“Cream’s Cover of ‘Sitting on Top of the World’ by Howlin’ Wolf is a Good Litmus Test for Old vs. New Music Taste”
First of all I must say congratulations to my Michigan Wolverines on securing the national championship in college football, hence violating what in the prior 25 years had been our serious policy against winning the championship in any sport. (I think we made something like eight final fours in that time between football, basketball, hockey … Read more“‘Hail to the Nixers’: A Brief Snapshot of Michigan’s Alternate Fight Song Permutation, from a Theoretical Standpoint”
A couple months or so I was tooling around in the downtown portion of South Bend, Indiana, my faithful place of birth and current residence, when I came upon something that sparked my attention keenly. Sun Kil Moon was to play a concert on December 6, at Stockroom East, a place I’d never heard of … Read more“My Hometown Seems to Be the Last Bunch of Losers Clinging to This Pathetic ‘Me Too’ Bullsh**”
I heard the Coldplay song “Viva la Vida” the other night in this quaint little sports bar where I was chilling. To be honest, I’d always found the song a little cheesy and just to roughly mimic in tempo and mannerism the former, mega-hit “Talk”; from their prior album. Eventually, though, as we all know, … Read more“How My Relationship with ‘Viva la Vida’ Has Shifted in the Wake of Recent Events”
Both LIVE and The Smashing Pumpkins took three years to release albums subsequent to their commercial apex as bands, the mid-’90s. I’m not sure if this is important but it’s sort of interesting to note. It’s also pertinent that there was a lot of messed up sh** going on in the world, such as an … Read more“Comparing and Contrasting Two High-Profile Commercial Followups, Adore and Secret Samadhi.”
It seems a shade misanthropic but my version of He** is pretty much hearing the music that people play in the sports bar on a Saturday night. I’ll be having a decent time, anyway — I was chilling in there this past Saturday evening, dead tired from a crazy dinner shift, and the Washington – … Read more“Where Black Sabbath and Creed Meet in the Dark World of Hopeless Sports Bar Denizenship”
Growing up here in South Bend, Indiana, where today there are 14 and a half violent crimes per 1,000 residents per year, I would come across certain people who were especially hard to please, when it came to music. The black people around here often term Wu-Tang “white people sh**” (especially ironic as one of … Read more“Third Eye Blind: AUDITED.”
It’s puzzling to me that in pretty much all of the Reddit discussions on “Snow (Hey Oh),” a hit single from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2006 album Stadium Arcadium, nobody really talked about the lyrics at all. They would tend to extol the guitar riff as if it were the second coming of Led … Read more“A Bit on ‘Snow (Hey Oh)’ and Its Ironic Endorsement of Narcissism”