In the downtown area of South Bend, Indiana, my hometown, the State Theater sits conspicuously empty, and now, even boarded up. It’s a minor disappointment — probably not as grave as the giant, still-vacant College Football Hall of Fame, which, to my knowledge, hasn’t had any foot traffic in about 13 years or so. Still, […]
It’s January 12, 2025, and Michiana braces for a deep freeze. We’d been due for a cold winter, and we’re surely getting it, with highs in the next few days in the teens, and some forecasted single-digits within a week or so. A stately, tranquil, white blanket of snow cloaks the landscape. We all, as […]
I had some professor one time, I think in grad school, who pledged this bizarre, incredulous allegiance to “kid a,” apparently a reference to the 2000 Radiohead album. That’s kind of like how Rumours is, Fleetwood Mac’s apparent commercial and artistic breakthrough from 1977. It’s like there’s this puzzling level of pride at mentioning “rumours” […]
In one of the more caustic SNL impersonations of all time, Jimmy Fallon handled MTV’s Carson Daly, once long ago. His take on Daly, at the time, struck me as a little ham-handed and excessively brash, as he even assigned to him the words “I’m Carson Daly and I’m a massive tool” [1] [2]. Unfortunately, […]
It’s true: The White Stripes could pretty much do no wrong in 2005. They’d gone from cutesy garage-rock-revival also-rans to rock demigods with Elephant (2003), which bequeathed us the invincibly virile “Ball and Biscuit”; the lilting and gorgeous “I Want to Be the Boy to Warm Your Mother’s Heart” and its show-stopping steel guitar solo, […]
Any meager, cursory glance at our culture in the world today should indicate decisively that lust and romance remain primary game for subject matter of pop lyrics. In terms of Stephan Jenkins, himself, he always seemed perfectly aligned with “pop” as a phenomenon by way of lyrics, which seemed to have begun, via his first […]