I have been fairly pleased, today, to encounter this year’s selections for Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees. One thing they all have in common is that they’re all beholden to an array of songs which are very near and dear to us — songs people lean on on a consistent basis, on an […]
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 […]
I remember, vaguely, the surreal worlds, the constant bevy of funny characters and the refreshingly low-budget aesthetic, as if some sort of phenomenological process were taking place within comedy, within television and within my life. I remember Nancy Kerrigan getting attacked and everybody making fun of her, including, I think, a dude at the Academy […]
* There’s a 1966 play by Tom Stoppard referencing two characters from Hamlet, titled “Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead.” The titular information is provided, ipso facto, as a plain fact attached to no emotional undulation, such as, hearing, say, in true postmodern fashion, “Jimmy Kimmel is slated to host Sunday’s academy awards.” .. Around the […]
Starting around Christmas and leading up until a couple of days ago, I was unemployed, languishing around my apartment, many a day, with nothing but my thoughts. As a result, I started to gather certain sort of lofty, idealistic ideas of what to do with my life, one of which was being one of the […]
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, […]