A Comicattle World: Blindfold Test #5

Thanks to the playlist that this fifth blindfold test just like its four predecessors is culled from, which playlist I have taken to playing in the background through the day, and which playlist as of this writing totals 4150 tracks adding up to 260 hours and 34 minutes, I now feel the need to confess…

40 Best Country Singles of 2023

The conversations I saw online this year about country music generally revolved around either white male Southern small-town lost-cause grudge-keeping (Jason Aldean, Oliver Anthony, and Maren Morris’s backlash to the same) or alternate viral routes to popularity (Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers, Oliver Anthony again, Bailey Zimmerman and Jelly Roll maybe, and I suppose Warren Zeiders…

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…

Antiseen profile, 1989

Published in Jack Thompson’s fanzine; reads like something I could only have originally written for Creem‘s metal magazine. Since Creem never “killed” anything I wrote, my best guess is that it was left without a home when the magazine went bust. Last I heard of Jeff Clayton, he was covering “When Electricity Came To Arkansas”…

150 Best Albums of 1973

Hate to be a killjoy or spoilsport, but I’ve never much cared about circuses. Sideshows I can get with — P.T. Barnum invented American popular culture if anybody did — but those three Ringling Brothers rings not so much. And I can’t even blame cruelty to big cats and elephants; it’s more that the whole…