Blurbs

To be honest, I haven’t really looked at pitchfork.com in a while, finding a slight problem, mind you, with their tautologically identical paragraph lengths, for one thing. It’s like, really, Pitchfork, all your paragraphs are the exact same length, and stuff?  I mean, it doesn’t matter, I guess. Sometimes all the paragraphs on your entire … Read more“Led Zeppelin’s ‘Four Sticks’ as Recorded Proof That Rock Songs Shouldn’t Be ‘about’ Anything”

Now, believe me, it was never my intention to write a post about Taylor Swift. I did muster out one default-love-poem to her circa 2015, during an unusually horny phase of mine, kind of as a way of positing myself as a found art object for whom all the meaning in life has gone.  I … Read more“An Old Curmudgeon Pontificating on Where Taylor Swift Would Stack up in the ’90s in Terms of Popularity”

About 80 miles or so west of London, sitting within England roughly where LA would be in relation to America, there lies, the water-flanked town of Bristol, which begat The Sundays in the late ’80s. They’re a band with a kind of an occult following, but for anyone unfamiliar, it’s like if Mazzy Star were … Read more“If You Get a Song by The Sundays in Your Head, You’re Probably Doing Alright”

At this point, obviously, nobody’s going to argue the greatness of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Cleveland’s proudest sing/song hip-hop group and overall purveyors of blistering, blissed-out and stoned-out “cool.” The “1st of tha Month” anthem is a routine denizen on social media, and, in general, if the group isn’t known as one of the weed-smokin’-est crews in … Read more“An Ironic Pontification on How Bone Stumbled upon the True Essence of Life with ‘The Crossroads’”

I’m writing this in repsonse to a headline I just saw on Bandcamp relating to the recently deceased rock musician/producer Steve Albini [1]. Now, of course, I realize it’s bad form to be critical of the dearly departed. Part of my issue, anyway, as it were, has to do with our annoying habit of speaking … Read more“Steve Albini ‘King of All Engineers’? Not So Fast”

* Warning: one of the music videos mentioned in this post contains graphic, even terrifying content of violence, homicide and extreme human malevolence. .. I thought postmodernism, to be honest, was a hoax, for a while, finally seeing the light as likening it to the nightly news and the stories “Six Crushed under Bus in … Read more“Conceiving of a Postmodernist Element in Music with the Help of Music Videos: Cat Power and Liars”

Sure, most Beck fans already know The Information rocks. It came out back in a time when the event of an artist like Beck doling a new release still created a BUZZ around town, like your favorite team making the championship, or an eclipse, or whatever. Probably more than any other instance, the luke-warm Pitchfork … Read more“Dolby’s Rupees: Beck – The Information”

I have a weird request for all readers of this site. I want you to familiarize yourselves with Dayton, Ohio. Of course, I am mostly just joking, but, in general, we bloggers would mostly extol the idea of having a readership which could readily name the three most important bands from Dayton — Brainiac, The … Read more“Takeaways from My Disillusioning Little Pilgrimmage to Downtown Dayton, Ohio”

You might remember that saying that goes, “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Of course, it’s depressing to think that we’re moving toward that conclusion as relates to Spotify, the most-preferred streaming platform in the world and the entity that’s pretty much completely taken the place of CD, in my … Read more“Spotify Blues”

Amidst this foreground of what can sometimes, seemingly, approach the realm of “detritus,” you’re likely to find a reliable local bloke playing the Gin Blossoms on a juke box, then promptly glaring at you and wondering why he’s not considered “cool” for his selection. Well, given the obvious fact that he probably doesn’t shop at … Read more“Discussing Sebadoh and the Concept of ‘Coolness’ in the ’90s”