Lovin’ Wreck: Blindfold Test #7

The most exciting part of these columns, immediately after I listen to all 25 songs (okay usually I’ll make it 26 just in case I mess up and one of my writeups is completely flat and incoherent), is going back and checking the app queue to find out what music I was just taking notes…

Black Country History Lesson

The topic is clearly all the rage this week, what with Beyoncé‘s new album and all, so I’m posting this old piece here and now despite it sounding as stiff and impersonal as a ninth-grade book report. When written, it was accompanied by a playlist. Sadly, that’s long gone. The past few years have been…

Where the Penguins Fly: Blindfold Test #6

Notable developments: (1) For the third blindfold test out of six, the song I like most is the one that’s been on earth the longest. That doesn’t necessarily mean I think older music is necessarily better, but….it might. (2) For the third Skyhooks song listened to out of three, I assumed a woman was singing…

Bible of Being Average: Blindfold Test #3

Quite a relief to learn the person singing my favorite song below, which embarrassingly turns out to be not only by far the oldest (that’s not the embarrassing part) but the one with by far the most problematic lyrics (that is), is of not the ethnicity I feared but rather the ethnicity he refers to…

150 Best Albums of 2023

As the hottest year on record so far wound down to a holiday season portending what’s sure to be an even hotter and otherwise frightening on many fronts 2024, an article began making the rounds on what little social media I tune into wondering whether rock music is dead, over, kaput. In 2023, no less!…

Early ’80s Mizzou, Part 2

Late last year, Randall Roberts assigned me a 2000-word piece for my alma mater University of Missouri-Columbia’s alumni magazine about Columbia’s music scene (clubs, record stores, bands, radio) in the early ’80s, when I was a student there as were Sheryl Crow and Brad Pitt. Eventually, after plenty of interviews and legwork, I convinced the…

Jelly Roll Blues

Finally just realized that what Jelly Roll’s “Need a Favor” reminds me of isn’t so much country or rap or gospel or Jamey Johnson or even Everlast so much as an HBO theme from the ’00s. Probably thinking of A3’s “Woke Up This Morning,” but maybe I need to go back and bone up on…

Did the ’50s NY Times dig that rock’n’roll?

As far as I’ve been able to discern, New York Times writers in the mid ’50s did not in any way distinguish “rock and roll” from “rock’n’roll” — the two terms were used interchangeably, Elements of Style oblivious. Frequently, they were metaphors — for a brash and penalty-reliant brand of ice hockey, a flip-flopping form…

150 Best Albums of 1957/’58/’59

Norman Mailer somehow managed to get through “The White Negro,” the monumental essay he published at just over 9000 words in Dissent in the autumn of 1957, without even once mentioning Elvis Presley (whose “Don’t Be Cruel” had just topped the pop and country and r&b charts in 1956), Jack Kerouac (whose On the Road…

A Central Texas Music Road Trip

Austin has long trumpeted itself as the Live Music Capital of the World, and for years it’s been the fastest growing big city in the United States. And that’s just residents. Every spring, close to 300,000 music, film and tech enthusiasts travel to South By Southwest; increase that population by half, and you’ve got the…