-John Fogerty
Worst Album Covers of All Time | The Tastebuds.fm Blog →
Pretty Self Explanatory. I haven’t heard any of these albums, but now I’m kind of afraid to.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]“So Happy Together”
Carmaig DeForest - Death Love Groove Party
Knitting Factory Works, 1993
Happy Valentine’s Day (Don’t Get Dumped)
In honor of Valentine’s Day, I’ve made a Valentine’s playlist. I’m sure everyone has more or less soundtracked the day, and these are by no means the only songs that pop into my head. But they’re among the most consistent offenders on Feb. 14ths over the years. Some you may have heard these songs, some you may not have. If you haven’t heard them, I encourage you to follow the links I’ve provided, or to track them down yourself.
Oral Tradition in the 2010s | Full Stop →
This is a link to a piece I wrote in December of 2011 for my friends at Full Stop, but it has at least some bearing on what I do here at BoTR. The piece, in a nutshell, is about the relationship between a receding culture of oral transmission and the dominance of recorded music and the ramifications of this state of things.
I know, that’s quite a nutshell. It’s quite a nut. Enjoy.
Katie Buono - Down by the Riverside
I went to college with Katie Buono – we would play the occasional open mic night at the local coffeehouse, but the only time we actually played pop music together was when we played a version of “Julia” together on a friend’s recital. Between those firsthand experiences and my peripheral knowledge about what she was up to, I knew she was one of the people at school who knew what she was doing. So I should’ve been prepared for Down by the Riverside, the solo album she wrapped up shortly after I left Oberlin.
I should’ve been, but I wasn’t.
Quote reblogged from Mark Richardson with 50 notes
Maybe we could spend extra time in 2012 thinking about how we, as individual listeners, respond when the music of the present seems especially connected to the music of the past. To figure out when and why we forgive artists that seem only the sum of very clear influences and when and why we actually seek out such artists. And maybe we could articulate a set of criteria for when “originality” is important to us. What does it really mean to “transcend influences”? Is that something that can be explained? What does it really mean to say an artist has a “unique voice”? We use these terms often, but I’m not sure we’re clear in our own minds what we mean by them. Maybe you have some proposed New Year’s resolutions for music critics in 2012?
Source: markrichardson
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Best of 2011
Now seems to be as good a time as any to look back on the year in music that was. Best-of lists can be divisive things — I never agree with anyone else’s, most likely no one will agree with mine. The hope here is that you’ll check out some of these records that you haven’t yet. So, here’s my two cents.
Less Talk, Less Rock
Today the AV club ran an astute – if overdue – article by Stephen Hyde about how Rock is no longer an appropriate catch-all term for popular music. The article itself is worth checking out, but the basic gist is that since Rock is an inadequate signifier since its place atop the charts has been taken over mostly by hip hop artists. The same can be said for pop: the radio station I used to help run, WOBC, lumps all tonal music into the pop category when it doesn’t fall into another genre. I actually like that, since its connotations are pretty nil. Rock is a different case, however, since the term itself implies a kind of benightedness when it’s bandied about as frequently as the AV Club thinks.
The Beach Boys - Smile
I wrote this article for Oberlin’s Wilder Voice’s May ‘08 issue. I’m reprinting it now, in honor of SMiLE’s release, which happened last week about forty years too late. The gist was to take a look at the allure of unreleased albums through the eyes of perhaps the most famous one, and the one that got me hunting for more jettisoned gems like the ones you find on this blog.
It isn’t hard to say why The Beach Boys’ music survived the 1960s. They were a band in exactly the right place at exactly the right time; they were making Rock n’ Roll records when the teenyboppers were screaming for Rock n’ Roll, and they made weirder shit when the same teenyboppers found drugs and stopped getting haircuts. As to why they survived the decades that followed, that’s a different story altogether. There’s a reason you’ll always hear about The Beach Boys before you hear about a band like The Zombies or The Turtles (other ‘60s pop bands). It’s that The Beach Boys embody something much darker than California Girls and muscle cars. And it’s got nothing to do with the music. The music is only a window into to the eye of the Beach Boys zeitgeist.
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