Author: Dan Seeger

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College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 56 and 55

Dan Seeger

56. Rancid, …And Out Come the Wolves Rancid’s third album was greeted with an extremely rare A+ review in Entertainment Weekly (back when that publication still had some credibility), with writer Chuck Eddy asserting the Berkeley punkers made a “better Clash record than London Calling.” That is the very definition of a bold statement. I do understand the impulse Eddy felt to draw a straight line from the California punkers to The Only Band That Matters. Circa 1995, there was a lot of tug of war taking place over the legitimacy of different bands, especially in the punk realm. Now, that’s … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 56 and 55

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One for Friday: Laurie Anderson, “Babydoll”

Dan Seeger

When I trace my foundational knowledge of the music I eventually immersed myself in at my college radio station, I usually have to cite either Rolling Stone or, more rarely, the keepers on the airwaves in my hometown. When it comes to Laurie Anderson, though, I’m fairly confident I was introduced to her by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. While the Chicago film critics dutifully covered the major studio releases on their weekly movie review program, they also committed themselves to highlighting the smaller, independent, even oddball films that weren’t likely to play at a theater near me, not just … Continue reading One for Friday: Laurie Anderson, “Babydoll”

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Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Forty

Dan Seeger

#40 — Meet John Doe (Frank Capra, 1941) For all the huffing and harrumphing that plenty of people resort to when engaged in discussions of the broken state of modern politics (and I include myself in that “plenty”), there’s a sad, corrosive truth at the core of our problems. To borrow a handy bit of phrasing, this dysfunction of our politics isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. That’s perhaps best evidenced by the ways in which the damage decried today as proof of the historic animosity and corruption within the power structure can be found recurring through U.S. history like the clearest … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Forty

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My Writers: Richard Price

Dan Seeger

There was a time in mid-nineteen-nineties — before my energy started to flag — when I actively sought out books that I knew were on their way to becoming potentially significant feature films. This was especially common, weirdly enough, after I no longer had a public outlet to review films, meaning I had no particular impetus — no mandate, imposed or otherwise — to fill in the background. Freed from the burden of collegiate assigned text, I felt I had the time (though I was routinely working well over forty hours per week) and I maintained a hangover principle from … Continue reading My Writers: Richard Price

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Greatish Performances #19

Dan Seeger

#19 — Eric Bogosian as Barry Champlain in Talk Radio (Oliver Stone, 1988) The play Talk Radio had its off-Broadway premiere in May of 1987, with its writer, Eric Bogosian, in the leading role. It wasn’t exactly viewed as transformational theatre (New York groused, “neither as drama nor as social psychology does it cut deep enough”), but it had the air of sensation to it. And it transformed Bogosian, however briefly, from that unique nineteen-eighties calling as “performance artist” into a more well-rounded creator who needed to be taken seriously. When the property was snapped up for a film adaptation, … Continue reading Greatish Performances #19

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Good Timin'”

Dan Seeger

By my rough count, the Beach Boys notched thirty-eight Top 40 singles over the course of their multi-decade career. A significant number of those made it into the Top 10, and four of those topped the chart. That quartet of number ones includes their final Top 40 song, a single so simultaneously awful and incessantly catchy that the only word that suitably describes it is “hellish.” (Seriously, don’t click on that link. The song will be trapped in your brain for increasingly uncomfortable hours upon hours.) In 1979, the band was in a rough space commercially. It had been three years … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Good Timin’”

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College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 59-57

Dan Seeger

59. Simple Minds, Good News from the Next World If I’d been forced to lay money on whether or not Simple Minds was still releasing new music in 1995, I would have placed my chips smack on “NO” and felt like I’d made a pretty safe bet. The band that peaked hard with the quintessential John Hughes soundtrack song one decade earlier never really stopped trying to outrace their biggest chart success, which came with the indignity of being the rare example of a track they recorded which they didn’t write themselves (they were at least the fourth different act … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 59-57

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One for Friday: Liz Phair, “California”

Dan Seeger

This is how I saw it: Liz Phair needed to reclaim some of the energy that surrounded her out-of-nowhere indie sensation debut, Exile in Guyville. By most measures, her follow-up effort, Whip-Smart, was an even greater success, climbing higher on the album charts, selling more copies (at least initially, though Exile in Guyville has outpaced it by now), and yielding a couple of decent modern rock radio hits. But her coolness quotient took a pretty sizable hit. She became a Rolling Stone cover girl instead of a Village Voice icon. That’s not inherently bad — and there are plenty of indications … Continue reading One for Friday: Liz Phair, “California”