You are dressed in a shirt with the font of the Nirvana smiley-face logo. The writing on the shirt, however, reads “Pac-Man.” Apparently, you found this shirt at Spencer’s, and paid about $25 for it, because you identified with the subversive message implicit in the mocking of Nirvana’s apparrel. You just never GOT Nirvana. They […]
I can’t see the ’90s but I can HEAR them. Sure, they’re long-gone. I know. Nobody says “Pimpin’ ain’t easy” these days, much to the relief of all of us. We know longer must endure pervy, delusional commentary from Adam Corolla or tongue-in-cheek sports analysis from quirky Sports Center anchors. But I can FEEL the […]
Just as bands can be guilty of falling into a “style over substance” mindset administrative to their creative outputs, such can critics, as well, overemphasize a band’s “style” as a potential pitfall, and ignore emotional authenticity, poesy of lyrics, brilliance in song structuring, and, of course, good ol’ fashioned undeniable energy. Now, granted, the Chili […]
It so happens that in my idle, time-killing habit of scrolling on Facebook, I’ve encountered a certain number of individuals who refer to The Beatles as “overrated,” or respond as much, implicitly, under post prompts, to be exact. Now, admittedly, there’s a number of cultural forces at work here. One, I think, is the intention […]
I think it’s clear at this point that if mainstream rock music is to continue to evolve, at all, it will have to in some way prioritize an element of funk, as a sort of stylistic catalyst or anchor. This is just my measurement from imbibing artists like Hozier, which seem bent toward a white-boy […]
To this day, it’s astonishing to me how much meaning I’m meeting and greeting with this band, how much inspiration they seem to have procured, whether in the bar, or the back alley behind it, or wherever. I mean, they’re the very definition of controlled popular rock, like Semisonic on prozac, if that’s possible. “Everything […]
Really, despite my maniacal tirades during the Vinyl Me, Please craze of colored records and hip-hop vinyl plugging [1], I’ve always loved vinyl. I have this memory of a religious experience in my life, for instance, which was hearing my mom’s Neil Young – Decade LP, and its closeur, “Long May You Run”; on wax. […]
Dear Ryan: It is on this hopeless, cloudy day in Arizona that I choose to write to you, apropos of your three-out-of-10 rating redolent to our 2001 album, Bleed American. You see, cloudy days aren’t supposed to happen in Arizona. We know how to deal with them for their non-frequency. I wrote a bunch of […]